Dead end pages on your website? You don’t need it!

February 27th, 2008 · No Comments

Almost all websites have an “end-page”. For example; “an order” or “a subscription to a newsletter” are considered as an end-page.
On these pages visitors will leave your website more often, than on other pages. Of course this is quite reasonable. There will be a moment visitors will leave your website anyway.

Only, to my opinion it is wise to keep your visitors as long as possible on your website.

Below I will give you a number of methods how to avoid dead-en pages.

Product pages
However product pages are not meant to be an end-page they often are. Product pages are pages with lots of information about a product. Often these pages have a higher abandon rate.
A visitor will be disappointed and leave your website because your product wasn’t interesting enough.

You can avoid this by putting a “go-back-button” on your website.
Sometimes bread-crumb-navigation will help you. This means you are showing click-paths to your visitor. For example: Home-Men-Trousers-Jeans

Confirmation page after an order
There are several ways to keep your visitors on your website after they booked an order.
You can ask you visitors to fill in a questionnaire or you can place a “tell-a-friend-button” on your page.
You can also use this page for customer-service. Show your visitors how to track their orders or give them an explanation about your FAQ-page.

Sorry, we haven’t found anything
A lot of people use the search bar on your page.

Sometimes your visitor is looking for something which isn’t on your site. In the worst case they will see something like “Sorry, we haven’t found anything”.
It is wise to put at least some product information on that page.
Naturally it is wise to measure how many people are actually using the search bar and what keywords they are using. Nowadays this is quite easy with Google analytics.

404 error pages
Hopefully you don’t have any dead-end links on your website. Although it is better to optimize your 404-page I already explained it in “I want to be found on error!”.

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