Designing a Website That Works for Short Attention Spans

Did you know most people decide whether to stay or leave your website in less than 8 seconds? 

We live in the scroll-and-scan era—and if your site doesn’t catch attention fast, you're losing potential clients before they ever read a word. 

In this episode, I’m sharing exactly how to design your website for short attention spans—so you can turn more skimmers into shoppers. 

Whether you sell services, courses, or products, these strategies will help your website work smarter (and convert faster). 

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Chapters

• 0:50 The 8-Second Attention Window
• 1:55 Visual Hierarchy for Better Conversions
• 4:39 Mobile-First Design Strategies
• 6:24 The 10-Second Skim Test Challenge

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:01

Did you know that most people decide whether to stay or leave your website in less than eight seconds? We live in a scroll and scan era. If you didn't already notice and if your site doesn't catch attention fast, you're losing potential clients before they ever read a word. In this episode, I'm sharing exactly how to design your website for shorter attention spans so you can turn more skimmers into shoppers. So, whether you sell services, courses or products, these strategies will help your website work smarter and convert faster. So let's dive in Struggling to turn website traffic into real sales. You're not alone and you don't have to figure it out all yourself. Welcome to Smarter Online Business, the podcast for course creators, coaches and e-commerce entrepreneurs who want their websites to convert visitors into buyers without the tech overwhelm. I'm your host, Saunders, a website strategist and conversion expert with over 20 years of experience. Each episode delivers simple, proven strategies to help you generate more revenue and make your website your smartest sales tool.

Carrie Saunders: 1:07

Welcome back to today's episode. We're talking about how do we get those skimmers into shoppers. So why does attention span matter and what does it mean for your website? So online visitors today are not reading every word. They're skimming for value. This means your design, layout and copy must immediately show these things who you are, what do you do, who is it for and what do they need to be doing. Next, if your site buries the good stuff or looks like a wall of text, which is easy to do, no shame there. Just note that we need to fix that. People will bounce before they ever see your offer. And, speaking of wallet tax, as I talk about this right now and as I built this episode, it made me realize, yeah, I probably need to be going to some of my pages on my website and breaking up those texts. So I want I'm going to talk about how do we do that today in this episode.

Carrie Saunders: 2:03

So first we want to have a visual hierarchy that helps better conversion and flow in your website. Your site should be designed like a funnel, getting people's attention span into the goal you want them to do. So what can help with that? First off, clear headlines H1s and H2s, that's, heading ones and heading twos speak to the pain points or to the transformation that you serve for your clients. And then we want to have supporting short punchy paragraphs or bullet points underneath these headlines. We want to make this scannable. And then we want to use strong call to action buttons that really stand out, and what I mean by that is we want to make sure that we have buttons that are a little bit of a different color than the rest of our site. This usually would be your third color and your branding is used for your call to action buttons. We don't want it to blend in with the other colors on your website.

Carrie Saunders: 2:59

And then we also want to use white space to reduce overwhelm, and it also gives us a place for our eyes to land. That white space helps our eyes land on those call to action buttons. So white space is very, very important and it also helps us, like I said, not be overwhelmed. Think about your desk. When you cleaned up your desk and cleared out the clutter, it feels a lot less overwhelming to have that white space. And then we also want to use visual anchors like icons or subheadings to really help draw the eyes where we want them to go. So here's a bonus tip I want you to try and this might sound silly the squint test. If you squint at your website and can't tell where your eyes are supposed to land and go, it's time for a layout update. So try that after this episode. So then we also.

Carrie Saunders: 3:47

The next part we want to do is making sure our website is mobile. First. That helps engagement. Over half of your visitors are likely viewing your site on a phone, so that means that the buttons need to be thumb or finger friendly and the headlines should be attention grabbing and above the fold on mobile. Many times we'll make that above the fold on desktop, but sometimes we miss the mark when it comes to mobile because we haven't checked the mobile version as well, and load speed matters more than ever on mobile. It is so easy for us to be designing our website on a desktop, uploading that great image that just looks beautiful on desktop and still fast on desktop, but it's too slow on mobile. So make sure you're checking your speed on mobile regularly. And then we want to stack important information early. You don't want people to have to scroll five screens to understand what you do. That needs to be really quick and easy for them to see. So a beautiful desktop is doesn't matter if your mobile version is frustrating. So we want to make sure that we are checking both very, very regularly.

Carrie Saunders: 4:52

And one of the things I want to encourage you to do, if you haven't already is go on over to smarteronlinebusinesscom forward slash newsletter. We give out tips like this once a week. We absolutely do not like spam as much as you, and we love to try to just make these newsletters bite-sized and really nice and actionable, something you can do something with and take that action, or schedule it on your calendar to take that action later. So be sure to go over to smarteronlinebusinesscom forward slash newsletter and sign up for our newsletter. And then I want to get to that bonus that I promised you about making sure our websites are scannable and skimmable, and it's a 10 second skim test. So you can do this today, and I recommend you get a friend to do this. You can do this yourself, but we do already know a bit more about what our websites are for and who they serve. So this is a little bit better if you get somebody else who's less familiar.

Carrie Saunders: 5:50

So ask them to open up your homepage and give them just 10 seconds to answer these questions what do you offer, who is it for, and what action should they take next?

Carrie Saunders: 6:02

If they can't answer these clearly in under 10 seconds, then your visitors probably won't be able to either, and this is going to give you the perfect, you know, reassurance and clue that you need to be working on the layout of your website and making sure it's scannable and easy to understand in less than 10 seconds. So I challenge you today have a friend and do this. I'll read those again what do you offer, who is it for and what actions should they take next? So have them check and see whether they can figure that out in less than 10 seconds, and I hope you love this episode of the Smarter Online Business Podcast and share it with a friend if this was helpful. I want to make sure that we are reaching as many other businesses as possible to help them make their websites smarter and work harder for them without them working too hard. And be sure to go over to Apple Podcasts and rate us a review over there. That helps also spread the word. We will be so forever grateful and we will see you next week.