We’ve all been to those websites before. You know, the websites that almost make you sick to your stomach from just how bad and gross they are. There are just too many things happening on them. If you’ve been fooled by a website a couple of times, you may even remember the name of the website, so you can try to avoid it in the future. I know I have a mental list of websites to avoid at all costs, but what makes these websites so bad? I’ve gathered a list of what people find to be the 5 most annoying things about being a visitor on a website. These are the things that you should avoid when building your website or blog. Annoying thing 1: There are too many ads When doing research for this post, we ran a poll on our Twitter. ‘Too many ads’ came in first place with 49 percent of votes. We’ve also seen many Reddit comments saying the same thing - most find do not like when websites have too many ads. Sometimes, a website has so many ads on it that it can’t even load the content! Even when it does load, the page is so cluttered it’s very hard to tell what’s going on. This is a very bad user experience. You might think more ads = more money, but that’s not always the case. When people see too many ads on your site, your bounce rate will start to go up. Bounce rate is when someone lands and leaves your site on the same page. If your bounce rate gets too high, it won’t matter how many ads you have on your site. Visitors have come and gone before they have even seen your content. A good rule of thumb is to stick with anywhere between 2-6 ads on any given page. We’d highly suggest not going above 8, as bounce rate starts to get very high after this. Place ads where they make sense, and definitely not over top of any important content. - Quality over quantity rings true with ads on your website. Annoying thing 2: Videos automatically play after loading Throwback to the old MySpace autoplay music days, am I right? I don’t know how people ever accepted autoplaying videos or ads on any website. This one will earn you an automatic blacklist from me, always. Nothing is more annoying than trying to read an article, and having a video play in the background as soon as the page is done loading. Sometimes, these websites make it incredibly hard to close these videos, which generally results in a mis-click from you and money for them. Unfortunately, this practice will probably continue as long as people are making money from. You can stop this annoying practice by not including videos that autoplay on your site. Help make the internet a better place one website at a time! Annoying thing 3: Popups every few seconds Every few seconds may be an exaggeration for a few sites, but others, not so much. It’s bad when you are trying to read an article, and keep getting interrupted to sign up, enter your email, or watch an ad. - People want a great user experience nowadays, and popups are not great. We understand that you need to make money, but please, don’t make it ruin our experience. We compromised with a popup sign up form on another site that we built. We didn’t want the sign up form to popup unless we knew our visitor might actually want to join. How did we do this? When the visitor gets to any page on the site, we start a timer for 3 minutes. If the visitor stays on the page for more than 3 minutes, we can safely assume they might be interested in joining, and out comes the sign up form. This obviously isn’t flawless, as it can still be annoying or intrusive, but at least we give our visitor some time to read some of our content. That site might get a few less sign ups by not showing the form to absolutely everyone, but the people that do see it are quality users. And we don’t join the mental blacklist. Annoying thing 4: The website is too slow In 2021 and beyond, there is no excuse for a slow website. If you’re trying to build any type of website, whether it’s a blog, brand, or online business, a slow loading time can be detrimental. - A slow site can cause would-be buyers to close out of the tab before it finishes loading. That may be a loss of revenue for you and a bad user experience. In the digital world, people are impatient, so things need to be lightning quick. Usually people will leave if it takes more than three seconds to load. A major thing that can cause a slow website is loading too many things at once. This usually happens if you have too many ads, videos, or other media on your site. It could also mean too much JavaScript, too many fonts, large CSS and HTML files, etc... Lower the amount of stuff your site is loading to quickly increase the speed. There are other ways to speed up your website, but we will stick with the basics for now. Annoying thing 5: Not mobile-friendly Just like with slow websites, there is no excuse not to be mobile-friendly in 2021. Not only does being mobile-friendly help you rank better in the search engines, if you aren’t optimized for mobile you will actually rank worse. Most people have a smartphone, and there are new people getting smartphones every day. Many of these people browse the internet exclusively on their phones. They could land on your site! With a Ninth Digital Website we made sure that your site will look good no matter what device your visitors are using. Summarize Today, we learned a few things to steer clear of when building your website. The main one being to avoid displaying too many ads to your visitors. It can actually lead to a loss in revenue, rather than a gain. Other things to stay away from - autoplaying videos or other media, email and sign up form popups, slow loading times, and not being mobile-friendly. These, of course, are the things that you need to avoid when creating a website, but make sure to find out all the things you should do when building a website. 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