If your website is unappealing in a thumbnail view

If your website is unappealing in a thumbnail view, people might ignore your site before they even click on a link to it. But with an effective preview of your site, you have an opportunity to increase your website traffic and the dollars that the traffic generates.

How good does your website look in miniature? That may seem like a silly question, but it’s an important one to consider. Why? Well, a few years ago, Ask.com started showing “previews” of websites, and now it looks like Google is about to do the same thing.

In the past, people used the “bounce rate”—which measures the percentage of people who leave your site after viewing just one page—to get a sense of how visitors reacted to their websites. If you have Google Analytics (a free tool) installed on your site, you can determine the bounce rate for your website overall or for a specific page on it.

Based on the bounce rate information, you can make changes to your website, in hopes that you entice visitors to spend more time on your site and thus increase the profitability from your site traffic. In the same way that people are more likely to buy something when they spend more time in a retail store, their presence—and their wandering around—in an online store is a pretty good indication that they’re invested in the buying process.