Do spelling mistakes and grammar issues have a (negative) effect on Website Conversion rates? We all have seen spelling mistakes on websites we’ve found interesting and it can be an instant put-off. Luckily, we don’t have to rely on gut feel about how conversions are affected by spelling mistakes (and of course even grammar mistakes). We’ve found a couple of studies highlighting the significance and influence of spelling mistakes on conversions and overall user perception of our website, our brand.
Now that sounds interesting: One study by Global Lingo found that a staggering 59% of respondents would not use a company that had obvious grammatical or spelling mistakes on its website or marketing material. Additionally, 74% of the people surveyed said they noticed the quality of spelling and grammar on a company’s website, indicating that these errors can have a profound impact on a brand’s credibility and customer trust (Link to the Study: click here).
In one interesting event, a website called tightsplease.com (which is no longer active but the story is funny and interesting still) had a misspelling of the word “Tights” and instead wrote “Tihgts” on one of the category overview pages. Sales were not satisfactory for a while, but after the error was found and corrected, the company noticed a jump of conversions of +79% for the mentioned category. While this website did not make it due to heavy competition in the field from the big guys, it still shows a good example of how conversions can hurt a sites reputation.
You’d be surprised how many spelling errors we find daily for our customers on even main product pages. Of course, not every spelling mistake hurts conversions in the same way, but we’ve seen bad errors even on key product pages. While there still where sales (we do not know if people did not see the spelling mistakes or if they did not care), especially for potential key customers, this can be a big red flag.
I mean think about yourself: let’s say you want to find a service that helps you deal with a task, and of course you want the service to be well built by professionals, secure, highly available and so on. Now you find a spelling mistake on a website that was dedicated to selling this high quality product, but you find a spelling mistake and now you obviously know, that the company did not even bother to read the content twice before publishing it. Why should it be different for they service, software etc? That is why there can be doubt about your service quality if the text quality is poor and spelling mistakes are present. This lack of trust is then the primary factor for a user to look for a competitor, who might have the same features or even less, but signals highest levels of quality by having flawless content on their website.
Imagine a customer doing market research. Now this person is not alone in the team and she or him works with colleagues. After finding a couple of possible solutions, including yours, they create a list and this list goes to the team, so that every member can voice their opinion about which product they perceive as the best solution for their needs. Now imagine that your product or service ticks all boxes in terms of features, but a couple of the team members notice flaws in your website’s content. Of course, this will irreversibly put a bad light on your service (as mentioned above, why should the KNOW that your product or service is built with more attention than your website content – THEY CAN’T KNOW!) and will automatically lead to your relevance sinking below your competitors.
So in short, it’s really good to know that poor website content quality and especially spelling mistakes really hurt the most when you try to attract the most promising customers. This is due to the fact that while small customers might just one person search a solution, this person might overlook the spelling mistakes, but as soon as several persons are involved, like it’s almost always the case for bigger companies, these mistakes will be seen and lower the percepted quality of what your offer.
A “fun” fact that we marketers always have to keep in Mind: If your site sports a conversion rate of 1% as compared to a conversion rate of 2%, the total sales volume is 50% lower! But of course this also works the other way round: if you manage to go from a 1% conversion rate to a 2% conversion rate, the sales volume is 100% bigger! This is why even small adjustments to your website, such as the perfect title, the perfect call to action or just the right information lead to more people following your sales funnel.
A Study involving a UK retailer, which reported an 80% increase in conversions after fixing a single, prominent spelling mistake on their main product page. This example underscores how crucial error-free content is for maintaining a professional image and encouraging customer trust (Source).
An interesting further fact is that studies in specific contexts, such as online dating, indicate that spelling errors can significantly influence perceptions of attractiveness and desirability of a person. Not only do profiles with poor text quality hurt the perception of the profile owner, but the same applies to texts in instant messaging software (Source).
These findings suggest that it’s a good investment to maintaining high standards of spelling and grammar for optimizing conversions and enhancing the overall credibility of your website and brand. Using a comprehensive spell-checking service like ours can help ensure that your website content is polished and professional. The Influence of spelling mistakes on conversions is clear and let’s face it – in most cases it’s just a pity for the effort you’ve put in everything to let some typos diminish the success. This is why we sat down and developed an answer to this.
Enter SpellWise, our online spell checking service designed to make spell checking your entire website effortless and comprehensive. And of course, SpellWise offers a suite of features tailored to meet the needs of you as a website owners and content marketer, because the service was built by us after having years of headaches working in agencies where we had either the issue of last minute website go-lives where it was almost impossible to spell check the entirety of a website (at a good enough level) as well as customers publishing content themselves the months and years later, sometimes without checking it (enough) prior to release. This is why we need a solution there.
Spellwise for my Website: Test SpellWise for your website – It’s free!
Spellwise for my Agency: Regularly check all your customers websites and manage findings in one dashboard
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