The Top 6 Ways To Increase Your Website’s Stickiness

Does your website attract visitors that don’t stick around? Rather than staying on your site, do your visitors leave within seconds? There are a lot of reasons why someone may bounce away from your site, such as a poor website design, bad navigation, and slow website loading speeds. The best way to help keep people on your site is to increase your stickiness factor.

Website stickiness is not only about keeping people engaged with your website, but the ability to bring them back again and again. Websites that are sticky likely offer its visitors a rewarding experience that encourages them to watch, read, listen, explore, and interact with your website in various ways. Plus, sticky websites also produce content on a consistent schedule, making it easy for people to know when to return to your website.

In this article, we discuss six ways to increase your website’s stickiness, along with a bonus tip. Keep in mind that there are other strategies out there, but we believe these are the most important ones for your business to initially focus on.

1. Provide Relevant, Scannable Content and Consistent Updates

It is well known that content is king, queen, and everything in between. Your website content is the most powerful and important method for keeping people on your website. Even if you have a beautiful website design, if your content doesn’t speak to your audience, or if your content is not what readers expected to find, they will likely bounce away within seconds of reaching your website.

There are a number of different strategies when it comes to creating powerful, optimized content for your readers. First, it is important that you follow the best SEO strategies and optimize your content with relevant keywords and key phrases. Just make sure your content isn’t too stuffed with keywords, as that can make your website hard to read and understand. Simple, direct language is often the best approach, as readers don’t want to search for the important information. If your content is easy to digest, then the faster people can scan through your site to find exactly what they are looking for. Plus, if your readers can find the content they need quickly, then they will likely remember your website as a good source to continue to refer back to.

While providing good, scannable content is important, it is just as important to remember to update your content. Whether that means rewriting content to contain the latest information or adding new blogs and articles, the more often your content is updated, the sooner people will come back for more. And just like the content itself, consistency is key. If you release new content on a consistent schedule, then people will know exactly how often they should be checking your website for updates. 

2. Keep Your Website Design Fresh and Exciting

It is pretty obvious when you visit a website with an older design, as there are many aspects that stand out, from boxy layouts to bad fonts and a heavy use of color. Now, just because a website has an older-looking design doesn’t mean it can’t provide good content. Some websites with older-looking designs may contain the exact content you’re looking for – if you are willing to find it. 

More often than not, if a website’s design is old, it likely means that their navigation system is not properly optimized. Whether they have a menu bar that is stuffed full with too many links and dropdowns, or their menu bar is so simple that it only contains a handful of pages, if people can’t find what they are looking for, they will move on to the next available source of information. 

Another issue that website readers face is the overabundance of ads or popups. If the backlash against cookie notices taught us anything, it’s that no one likes unnecessary messages popping up on their screens. If their reading gets interrupted by a popup of any kind, they are more prone to bounce away.

So, what can you do to make your website modern and more visually appealing? First, focus on the basics. Ensure your website works perfectly on all screen sizes. Just because your website’s theme is responsive doesn’t mean that the responsiveness is working exactly as it should be. You need to browse your website on different devices to emulate what your potential visitors are seeing. Another important factor for website visibility in 2024 is accessibility. Everyone is different, and those with visual impairments still need to be able to consume information from the internet. Don’t leave anyone behind, and use a service such as Userway to enhance your website’s accessibility. 

Finally, when it comes to the latest website trends, keep in mind that things are constantly changing and evolving. However, there are several trends currently dominating modern website design, including utilizing AI tools, oversized buttons and titles, and offering a dark mode to appeal to all types of readers. Do your research to find what will work best for your website design.

3. Easy to Understand Website Navigation

As touched on in the previous section, poor navigation can lead to multiple issues. The most glaring being that if your menu bar is cluttered, then it’s going to be difficult for people to find what they are looking for. While this is most commonly an issue for websites with dozens of pages, this can still be an issue for websites with less than ten pages. When it comes to smaller sites, the key here is to make sure the menu items do not contain long titles to ensure that all the links can fit on the menu bar with as little drop downs as possible.

Speaking of dropdowns, nesting dropdowns within dropdowns is typically frowned upon. It doesn’t matter if people are browsing on a computer or a smartphone; this navigation can be clunky and hard to use. Essentially, the more clicks it takes for someone to find what they are looking for, the more likely they will leave to find the information elsewhere.

So, what can you do if your website has dozens of links and you want them all found easily? The key here is to utilize other areas of your website. There are three main places where links can go: in the header’s main menu bar, in the footer, and on the page itself. As we’ve discussed, it is best to keep the main menu bar in the header as clutter-free as possible. So the main menu should be reserved for the top level links. The most common links are ones like ‘services’, ‘contact’, ‘about us’, ‘products’, and of course, a link back to the home page. Then, dropdowns under ‘services’ could list out the main buckets, like a ‘web design’ service page.

From there, on the ‘web design’ page, you can have a section at the top of your page that links to specific web design services, like ‘WordPress’, ‘Kajabi’, ‘Shopify’, and ‘Thinkific’. This can be built using a sidebar, icons, or short paragraphs with an accompanying image. Take a look at our web design services page to see how we’ve done it. 

4. Interactive Content Increases Stickiness

While text is still the main form of content, there are many other options out there that can help to increase stickiness, including images, infographics, surveys, polls, quizzes, interactive content such as hover effects, and of course, the most popular–video.

Before diving into the power of video, let’s review what interactive content is. From image sliders and testimonial sliders to flip boxes and hover effects, there are a lot of forms of interactive content. The key to using interactive content successfully is to not overuse interactive elements. If everything is moving around when your mouse moves, then sensory overload can kick in. It’s best to use it sparingly, but in a way that is powerful. Check out Rely-On Technologies’ home page and mouse over the ‘Our Spray Booth Services’ section to see a well-done example of interactive boxes. While interactive content can make your website stylish, it’s only as powerful as the content on the site.

Now, you are likely already very familiar with how popular video is nowadays. From Tik-Tok and Instagram to YouTube and even Netflix, people are watching more videos than ever before. Many online advertisements even use video. The challenge here is bringing these elements into your website with purpose.

In general, if you plan to add video to your website, short form videos are encouraged. Few people are willing to watch a video for even two minutes if they don’t have any attachment to the brand. So keep your videos short and to the point, even when it comes to testimonial videos.

Also, keep in mind that not everyone likes watching videos, so don’t lean too heavily into that form of content either. The best practice is that if you have a video like in a blog post, then provide text for someone to scan through as an option to consume the same information. 

5. A Fast Website is Sticky Website

By now, most of us know what it’s like to visit a site that takes seemingly forever to load. More often than not, visitors will leave if a website takes too long to load, unless they know the site well enough to make the wait worth it.

According to Search Engine Land, in 2024, people wait an average of 8 seconds for a website to load. So if your website takes longer than 8 seconds to load, you should consider addressing and fixing your website loading time.

The first step to do this is to determine just how long it takes for your site to load. There are a number of tools out there, including GTmetrix and Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It is important to look at both the desktop loading speed and the mobile loading speed, as it can differ between the devices. These sources also provide tips on how to fix your site speed. Some of the most common factors that bring down a website’s speed are large images, background videos, plugin conflicts, and too many scripts trying to run at once.

Keep in mind that there is a delicate balance between your website design and your website’s speed. You may need to sacrifice certain design elements to favor your website speed, as it’s more important for people to be able to see your site’s content versus large, pretty images.

6. Don’t Let Your Website Fall to the Wayside

Once you get everything optimized including your design, navigation, content, and site speed, what’s next? Is there anything more to do once your site is performing exactly the way it needs to perform?

The answer is a resounding yes. There are always updates and maintenance to do to websites. As we mentioned, it is important to release new content on a consistent schedule through blog posts and other means. It is also important to ensure your content stays up to date, so when changes happen to your business, let that be known on your website as well.

Then, it is highly important to keep the backend of your website in top shape. That means regularly updating plugins, themes, WordPress itself, and even your website’s PHP version. All the different components play a role in your site speed and in your website security. One of the worst things that can happen to your website is security breach, so ensuring all your plugins and components stay up-to-date is extremely important. 

It is also important to keep your design relevant and fresh. Make sure your website is changing with the times by implementing new design elements and removing old ones. While doing this, keep in mind that drastic changes can be surprising to your visitors, so keep your visitors informed on your website’s changes as well through newsletters and blog posts. 

Bonus Tip: Learn from the Greats

It doesn’t matter if you have a product-based website, a service-based website, or an informative website; there are always ways to improve your website. One of the best ways to learn about new trends is to keep an eye on the biggest websites out there. From Amazon and Canva to Wikipedia and YouTube, the giants in the website industry typically know what they’re doing. That’s not to say that they don’t make mistakes–even Google can stumble from time to time. 

Sure, your website may not be anything like Canva or YouTube, but the point is that you can get ideas from what they do well. There is a lot to learn from these giants, including design elements, copywriting tips, and social media ideas. Even if your business is nothing like Canva, is there a design element that is working well for them that you can borrow? As they say, you never know unless you try.

Create Your Niche in the World Wide Web

The internet is a big place. According to Siteefy, there are close to 1.1 billion websites out there. While that is a huge number, they estimate that only 18% of those websites are active. In addition, around 252,000 websites are created every day. That being said, getting found online is difficult. However, if you follow the tips laid out in this article, you can build a sticky website with relevant content and a loyal following. 

If you have any questions or would like our support, reach out to us today, or take our Online Presence Audit to discover even more opportunities on improving your site!