Dive Brief:

• Two in 5 customers said they were frustrated by website experiences in 2023, according to a Contentsquare study of more than 3,500 websites and 43 billion site visits, released Wednesday. 
• JavaScript errors and pages that loaded slowly were the leading causes of frustration, which Contentsquare defines as specific moments of friction in the online experience.
• “The good news: most of the leading causes of frustration are highly avoidable hurdles,” Jean-Christophe Pitié, chief marketing and partnerships officer at Contentsquare, told CX Dive in an email. Technical issues like slowly loading pages can easily be spotted and addressed, but businesses need to continually monitor the online experiences they’re providing customers, he said.

Dive Insight:

When a customer’s visit to a website becomes a frustrating experience, its impact can vary greatly, from a momentary inconvenience that distracts a customer to a customer choosing to no longer engage with a site.

“Customers aren't so willing to give second chances, and the universal bounce rate is still hovering around 50%,” Pitié said. “That means one in two customers never make it past the first page of a site." 

Brands only have seconds to make a good first impression, he said. 

Contentsquare is not alone in its findings. Just over half of consumers say they reduce or stop spending at a business after a very poor experience, according to Qualtrics XM Institute. 

“Frustration and trust are more connected than you might think, so getting that experience right from the first step of the customer journey to the last is critical,” Pitié said.

The rate of frustrating website visits rose nearly 4% year-over-year, according to Contentsquare. JavaScript errors were to blame for the increasing rate of frustrating digital experiences, while page loading times and rage clicks — when a visitor repeatedly clicks an element within 2 seconds — improved year-over-year.

Other measures of frustration — instances when buttons or fields or other elements were clicked multiple times and low page activity — remained flat or slightly decreased.

Notably, frustration increased in every industry except software. Travel and hospitality sites performed the worst, with just over half of visitors reporting frustration.

Poor website performance can also have disastrous consequences on SEO. Google’s latest Core Web Vitals measures page loading performance, interactivity and visual stability, and rewards those sites that perform well and penalizes those that don’t with lower search rankings.

“Google’s Core Web Vitals are a standard for how to measure necessary aspects of the consumer’s digital experience, succeeding in these metrics is paramount to a company’s success,” Pitié said.