If your website is not optimized, at a certain point, customers who visit your website are going to become so frustrated that they will reach their “boiling point”. This is the moment when they give up and log off.

Frustration levels can grow due to a number of reasons, the most frequent of which are slow loading speeds, frequent crashing, or non-intuitive navigation. If any or all of these are associated with a visit to your business’s web pages, you may be losing more customers than you are gaining.

Test Drive Your Website

Many business owners launch their websites then rarely or never visit them again. This is a mistake. Lots of things can go wrong post-launch, especially if you aren’t continually “test driving” your website.

For example, load times can come at a snail’s pace. This is often caused by overloaded servers, the use of cheap and/or poorly managed hosting services, or code problems within the website itself. The most common cause of “boiling points” is when visitors get fed up with waiting and leave a site out of frustration, often never to return.

The simple solution is to periodically check in on your website’s function by visiting it anonymously as a customer. Then you can see first-hand what your customers experience when visiting your business online. The results may surprise you — and not in a good way.

Fixing Problems

Identifying issues that frustrate customers is the first step. Fixing them quickly and effectively is the second.

Once you understand why people are logging away from your website, a sense of urgency should set in to correct and improve the issue so that it stops turning people away. Addressing common problems like loading speeds and crashes helps your business attract and retain a larger share of your potential market.