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Digital | Developing better websites
Three takeaways from recent research
A recent benchmark report by digital consultancy Substrakt analysed the performance of 76 websites in the cultural sector across Europe and North America, provided three main takeaways:
- It’s a mobile-first world. On average, more than 69% of traffic to cultural websites is on mobile devices. The organisation with the lowest proportion still saw 50% of their website traffic coming from mobile devices, while the one with the highest proportion saw 82% of their traffic come from mobile devices.
- Most people do not enter your site via the homepage. Across our study, just 16.6% of website entrances were via the homepage, with more than 80% of traffic entering from elsewhere. We know users form first impressions almost instantly (research shows this happens in less than five milliseconds), so it is important to ensure that the pages that do act as entry points to your website provide a consistent and useful experience for your users.
- Organic search is your most valuable acquisition channel – but that might be changing. Organic search is responsible for the biggest proportion of website traffic and revenue (more than 40% for both). But Google’s new AI-powered search product could significantly impact the traffic cultural websites receive from search engines. So it’s essential to revise plans accordingly.
Ash Mann is executive director at Substrakt