The Two-Tenths Rule

Two-tenths of a second is all it takes to make or break your business.

Don’t believe me? If you have a website, you’d do well to listen. American Express’s Open Forum tells us that two-tenths of a second is all it takes for visitors to form a first impression. And, you know what they say about first impressions: you only get one chance.

We keep hearing the main goal of having a website is to get lots of traffic. Really? The point is to get sales, and traffic is just one part of that. While getting potential customers in your door (or your website) is important, you also need to them to actually become paying customers, not just visitors. Getting traffic just for traffic’s sake is, well, pointless if you can’t convert. And, you won’t get that chance to convert if nobody sticks around long enough.

Why? Because studies have shown that the longer visitors stay on your site, the more positive feelings they have about both your site and your business. If your site has a bad design it’ll turn them off within two-tenths of second. After that, they’ll be shopping elsewhere instead.

So, how do you make sure that two-tenths of a second counts? Powerful website design.

There’s just no excuse to have a poorly designed website any more. An attractive, easy-to-navigate, effective design can be built for a fraction of the cost it would have been a few years ago (not to be mistaken with cheap, do-it-yourself versions). People come to your site for a specific reason, whether to get information, make a purchase or contact you. Whatever their reason, they should have no problems following through. Confused people do nothing. You want clients, not confused people.

Take it from Jakob Nielsen, one of the foremost experts on Web usability, who says a successful site design, or redesign, has an 80 percent ROI due to lowered costs — like not wasting staff time answering simple questions — and not missing sales from impatient people.

“People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience,” Nielsen told the BBC once. Boy, was he spot on? How about to the tune of two-tenths of a second?