12 ways to find and fix user pain points on your website

Your website has a monumental job to do: it needs to engage, persuade, and convert visitors into long-term customers. But if users experience frustration while browsing, they’re more likely to abandon ship than stick around or sign up.

Moments of frustration—also known as user pain points—negatively affect the customer experience (CX), resulting in issues like cart abandonment, lower conversions, and lost revenue.

To create a painless experience for users, product and marketing teams need to work together to ensure they fully understand and optimize the customer journey. Read on to learn how to address common pain points to improve CX and website performance, with actionable tips to help you get started today.

Key insights

• The 4 types of user pain points—design and functionality, process, financial, and support—negatively impact the customer experience and affect key business metrics

• To address these pain points effectively, you need user behavior data and experience insights. AI-powered platforms and capabilities give you empathetic, targeted takeaways without requiring hours of analysis, so you can prioritize your resources and make real improvements, fast.

• User friction thrives in siloes. Encourage teams to dig into your user data and share insights cross-functionally to connect the dots between each stage of the customer journey, spot underlying issues they’d otherwise miss, and collaborate on solutions. 

4 types of user pain points on your website—and what to do about them

User pain points are moments of friction on your website or product that cause user frustration and prevent people from completing their goals. They can occur due to a range of factors, from usability and user experience (UX) issues, to confusing design, to misleading marketing copy. 

This means they affect a wide range of metrics across the user journey—and every team has a role to play in tackling them. 

Here are 4 common user pain points you need to address to improve conversion rate optimization (CRO) and business performance.

1. Design and functionality pain points

Design and functionality pain points are usability issues or moments of user friction caused by your website's performance or layout. 

This includes user interface (UI) and UX factors like

• Slow load times

• Broken links

• Software bugs

• Inconsistent design

• Accessibility issues

• Call-to-action (CTA) buttons that get overlooked

• No mobile optimization

These pain points can cause users to abandon your site, resulting in high bounce and low conversion rates.

3 ways to identify design and functionality pain points with Contentsquare

• Discover which pages need immediate attention with an AI-generated user frustration score. Quickly identify pain points based on frustration factors like rage clicks, multiple button clicks, and JavaScript errors, then quantify their impact on revenue and conversions to prioritize which ones to fix first.

• View heatmaps to see which content elements are causing problems. Get a visual representation of where users click, move, and scroll to learn which parts of your page capture (or lose) users’ attention. Determine whether users are seeing important content and CTA buttons, and find unexpected areas of friction (like repeated clicks on unclickable elements) that may be causing issues.

• Watch session replays to contextualize how these pain points impact the entire customer experience. Once you’ve identified worrying user signals like a high bounce rate or low click-through rate (CTR), use session replays to see what happened before, during, and after the user interacted with those pages. 

💡 Pro tip: save hours of analysis with Contentsquare’s AI-powered Session Replay Summaries. Filter sessions by frustration score to find ones that need your immediate attention, get quick insights summarizing key takeaways, and jump directly to moments of friction with time-coded links to see exactly what happened.

Session Replay Summaries can also analyze user behavior patterns across multiple sessions, so you can stay ahead of trending issues, compare performance between devices, and make data-driven decisions, faster.

Contentsquare’s AI-powered Session Replay Summaries gives you valuable insights from one or multiple user sessions, saving you hours of manual analysis

2. Process pain points

Process pain points are moments of friction that interrupt the user’s journey or workflow and prevent them from taking the next steps (like signing up for an account or making a purchase) on your website.

Examples of process pain points include

• Confusing navigation

• Looping or complex journeys

• Complicated workflows, such as difficult checkout processes

• Lengthy forms or sign-ups

3 ways to identify process pain points with Contentsquare

• Use Journey Analysis to discover common user paths. Visualize customer journeys from the beginning to end to see how people actually navigate your site—and where they’re getting lost or confused. Optimize common paths to reduce exits, and work backward from high-converting journeys to learn what makes them so successful and drive more of the right outcomes.

• Analyze your marketing and conversion funnels. Map key processes out as multi-step funnels to track how users progress through each step. Identify exactly where users drop off, then zoom in with session replays to understand why—and what to do about it—all without leaving the Contentsquare platform.

• Run unmoderated user tests to find blockers in your current processes. Record participants as they complete a set task on your site to see how they interact with your page in their own time. Collect feedback at the end for additional context about how easy (or difficult) participants found the process, and make improvements based on real user needs.

Launch unmoderated user tests in Contentsquare to find process pain points

3. Financial pain points

Financial pain points are related to costs associated with your product or service.

Some examples of financial pain points include

• Paywalls blocking out content or features

• Hard-to-cancel subscriptions

• Additional fees at checkout

• Unclear pricing or pricing plans that don’t feel reflective of what users are receiving

3 ways to identify financial pain points with Contentsquare

• Launch exit-intent surveys on key pages like your checkout or pricing page to capture in-the-moment responses to understand why users are leaving without making a purchase or signing up. Ask a mix of closed- and open-ended questions to get both quantitative and qualitative data about their reasons for leaving.

• Adopt user research methods like interviews to get in-depth feedback about your pricing plans. Run focus groups or 1:1 sessions with various personas from your ideal target audience—like key stakeholders on the buying committee—to understand prospective customers’ needs and concerns, then use these insights to design and market your pricing packages.

• A/B test your pricing page to see which copy and design leads to the most conversions and sign-ups. Trial variations like showing the price for monthly versus annual plans, including more information about features and capabilities, and customer proof points like testimonials or reviews, to see which combinations drive the best results.

💡 Pro tip: use the Contentsquare and AB Tasty integration to understand not only which variant in your A/B test performs better, but why. Create experiments in AB Tasty, then enrich your results with Heatmaps and Session Replay in Contentsquare to compare behavior across different pricing pages and learn which elements had the greatest impact.

Use Session Replay in Contentsquare to compare user behavior across your test variants and glean valuable insights

4. Support pain points

Support pain points are caused by issues with the customer service users receive throughout their journey. 

This includes

• Long wait times to talk to a customer support agent or receive an answer to a query

• Little or no self-service support (like FAQs about common policies, technical help docs, and a knowledge base or blog content)

• Lack of contact details or multichannel support

• Poor ongoing support to help them get the most from your product once they’ve converted (which can lead to customer churn)

Customer support is crucial at every stage of the customer lifecycle, so these pain points affect conversion and retention.

3 ways to identify support pain points with Contentsquare

• Trigger Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) surveys to measure customer satisfaction. Launch NPS® surveys to user segments that have recently contacted your support team or viewed self-serve help content. Ask them, “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” to gauge overall sentiment and understand how your support offering is affecting customer satisfaction. 

• Follow up on negative feedback to get deeper insights. Jump straight from a survey response or negative piece of feedback to an associated session replay in Contentsquare to see what happened before and after the user left their comment. Want to drill down further? Invite them to a user interview to get even more information.

• Create helpful guides to proactively give users the information they need. Ease the demand on your support team and empower customers to self-serve 24/7 with detailed content about topics they care about. This can include thought leadership, industry best practices, and product documentation. Insert links to these guides throughout the customer journey and monitor KPIs like page views and engagement to continuously improve.

💡 Pro tip: analyze content performance in Contentsquare to find optimization opportunities. View heatmaps and watch session replays for your guides to see how far users scroll, where they hover (indicating engagement), and what they do next.

Trigger feedback widgets asking them to rate their experience with your guides to learn whether they find your content useful, or launch lightweight surveys to gather suggestions for topics they want to see next.

Ask users how they feel about your content with Contentsquare’s lightweight feedback widgets

3 best practices for tackling user pain points

For the best results, keep these 3 best practices in mind as you find and fix user pain points. 

1. Collaborate cross-functionally

For truly user-centric businesses, addressing pain points is everyone’s responsibility. Product, UX, design, marketing, and customer-facing teams like support and success need to work together to surface and solve moments of friction.

Create shared channels in Slack or Microsoft Teams where you can quickly share relevant insights about pain points (like snippets from session replays with a high Contentsquare frustration score) with other teams to get buy-in, prioritize effectively, and rally around solutions.

2. Measure your impact for continuous improvement

Monitor key metrics with product dashboards to easily track trends and understand the impact of the changes you’ve made. Create custom dashboards in Contentsquare to give you an at-a-glance overview of the performance KPIs that matter to your team, like bounce rate, average session time, and frustration score. Then, zoom in on the details by jumping to relevant session replays with a single click for more context. 

Watch how KPIs transform over time to ensure your optimizations are improving CX, and spot emerging user behavior trends (like a spike in bounces) to take action before they become issues.

3. Understand the root cause of the problem

Different types of user pain points require different solutions. For example, functional pain points (like software bugs) can often be fixed quickly, while emotional pain points (like frustrating experiences) may need more in-depth user behavior research. 

The 3 main types of user friction are

• Interaction friction, which is caused by UX or UI errors 

• Cognitive friction, which occurs when processes require too much mental effort from the user

• Emotional friction, which stems from negative emotions during the customer experience

Understand the type of friction behind your pain point and combine quantitative and qualitative data analysis to get a full 360-degree view of the issue. This ensures you’re fixing the underlying cause of the problem, not just a symptom of it.

Fix user pain points to boost website performance

If left untreated, user pain points can grow from minor inconveniences to serious, business-altering problems. To give users the seamless experiences they expect, teams need to analyze user behavior on their website to find potential issues—and identify data-driven, user-centric solutions that drive conversions.

FAQs about user pain points