You’ve heard of the five second rule for food. When your toast hits the ground, you’ve got five seconds to pick it up before it’s lost to whatever bacteria is coating the floor. There’s also a five second rule that good web designers use when creating effective content. The basic rundown is if you can’t grab the attention of your site’s visitors in five seconds or less, they’re probably gone for good.
What’s the Five Second Rule for Web Design?
Essentially, the five second rule serves as a usability test to assess the immediate clarity and impact of a web page. It is often used for a landing page or blog post, but it can even be employed for your homepage itself.
Make It or Break It: Factors Affecting the Five Second Rule
There are a couple of major factors that can make or break your website’s five second rule. The first is how long your website is taking to load. No matter what your product or service may be, the average user has limited patience, and the likelihood of page abandonment increases every second your site takes to load. Just look at some of the stats:
- When disappointed with website performance, 79% of shoppers will be less likely to pay for your product or service.
- Quick load times are important to 52% of shoppers.
- Expect experiences to spread: 44% of online shoppers tell their friends about a bad online experience.
Good content, design, and a clear message are also just as important as load time. For example, if your visitors have to guess about your services, they’re not going to stick around. Be sure your content spells out exactly who you are and what your company does. Good, clear navigation is necessary as well. Don’t make visitors guess about what to click on; create clear, live links to other pages on your site.
What to Do
It’s obvious that good design comes down to quick load times, a clear message, and a navigable site. But, just how do you make that happen? First, it’s much faster and easier to build your website from templates, available from platforms such as WordPress, instead of building your site from scratch. In addition, your web design shouldn’t have a lot of visual noise, including a messy color scheme or animations all over your homepage. If this is all too overwhelming, it’s okay to find a high quality and affordable service that can help.
At SteerPoint, you can expect high quality web design assistance that will turn down the noise and turn up response time to help your business grab users right away.