How your Shopify site can win the fight against declining attention spans

Eight seconds. That’s all the time your website has before you lose…the… users’... sorry, I just got a text, hold on one second.

Okay, what was I saying?

Studies indicate humans, on average, have an attention span of eight seconds. Twenty years ago, the average attention span was twelve seconds. Is it any surprise that our attention span is diminishing?

Humans' collective attention span is narrowing over the years because of the increased competition for our attention. The amount of information available to us demands more time and attention than our collective brains can focus on at once. How can your Shopify site fight against users’ diminishing attention span? By grasping their attention and making those eight seconds count!

Average Ecommerce Bounce Rate

Capturing users’ attention is essential to successful Shopify stores as it allows them to lower their sites overall bounce rate. On average Shopify stores experience a 38.7% bounce rate on desktop and 48.5% on mobile devices. Lowering your Shopify site’s bounce rate is important as bounce rate translates to how long users are staying on your Shopify site before ‘bouncing’. High bounce rates kill lead generation, user engagement, conversions, sales, and revenues for Shopify stores, which is why it is increasingly important to lower bounce rate. Below are three ways your website can capture users’ attention and lower bounce rate.

The Faster The Better

One of the biggest impacts to a high bounce rate is slow page load speed. Page load speed measures how quickly your Shopify store loads from the time user’s click on the page to when they land on your store homepage. These seconds are critical to visitors staying on your site longer as research reflects that consumers expect sites to load within 2 seconds, after 3 seconds many users will abandon the site.

Why is page load speed so critical? The longer your website takes to load, the more consumers your site is likely to lose. This can mean consumers abandoning shopping carts, losing conversions, and ultimately, losing sales. According to estimates, almost $500 billion e-commerce revenue disappears annually due to slow page load speed. It is incredible how a few critical seconds can have such a large impact on revenue loss.

So what can you do to prevent your website from losing user’s attention, and save lost sales? A good place to start is testing page load speed by using website insight programs like Google PageSpeed. Use this to check if you’re even within the average page load speed benchmark.

You should also take a look at user behavior reports in Google Analytics to see pages with high bounce rates and higher than average load speeds.

Attention to website page load time can provide your website with valuable insights into elements which can improve overall page load speed. These elements include, reducing server response time, condensing images and media, prioritizing visible content, enabling browser caching, optimizing CSS, HTML, and Javascript, as well as minimizing redirects.

Know Your User’s Habits

When you click on a website, what’s the first thing you look at? Well according to researchers, user’s typically follow an F-shaped reading pattern when landing on a website. This F-shape pattern begins with a horizontal scan along the top of your content area, a second, shorter horizontal scan further down the page, and lastly a vertical scan down the left side of the website.

So what does this mean for your Shopify store? When consumers make an initial horizontal scan across your site, they should find important information about your store. When consumers shortly scan slightly lower on your site they should find a call-to-action or suggested next steps which can be found by a third, vertical scan along the left side of your website.

Understanding the needs of your site’s users can allow you to optimize your Shopify store’s design in order to maintain users' attention all the way through the checkout process.

Engage With Video Content

With attention span continuing to decrease over the years, incorporating video content into websites has become crucial to capturing users attention. Adding video content to your website allows users with short attention spans an option beyond traditionally reading long-form content. Video content can be incorporated into your website in a multitude of ways including homepage video, product demonstration, how-to videos, brand story/history video, client testimonials, user-generated videos, and more. According to Shopify partners, the four most effective ways to integrate video content into your Shopify site are:

• How to/Explanation Videos: for storytelling
• Product Page Videos: to draw in shoppers
• Video Testimonials: for credibility building
• Landing Page Videos: to really sell your product/service

As user attention span continues to decrease, Shopify sites are forced to find new ways to grab and maintain user attention. A few ways in which this can be accomplished include optimizing your Shopify site’s page load speed, understanding user habits, as well as engaging with users through the integration of video content. Utilizing techniques such as these are sure to keep users attention on your site for longer.