The importance of the Back Button

When designing a website, people often forget the importance of the back button. You often see a ‘back to home’ button, or something along those lines, but a back button has to link the pages that your customer has visited most recently, in the right order, which can sometimes be a bit more difficult to construct. On most sites therefore, they are just a sham – a guess at the last page that the visitor was on based on the most likely progression through the site.

The back button is important because most people will land on your web page looking for something specific. They will skim the content of your site until they find the keyword they are looking for. Once they have found what they want, the quickest way to leave your site, or find another relevant page, is through the back button usually.

For most people, this has become a subconscious action these days! Most people will click on a site and hover the mouse over the scroll-bar area, in case they need to scroll the page down, then, when they are done with the page, they click the ‘back’ button on the top left hand side of the browser to go back to the previous location.

Some sites decide that they don’t want their customers to leave, and therefore use a chrome-less window (with no back button). Some have even gone so far as to close down the original window and open the site in a window with no controls.

This kind of thing is not making your site more customer friendly, in fact , once they figure out they are trapped on your site, lack of commonly used controls are more likely to frustrate your visitor and likely guarantee they never come back, unless it is accidental, or the information you have is exceptionally good! It makes your site less useable.

So my point here is that you are really doing yourself a disservice if you take away your customers back button because instead of tricking them into staying, it is more likely to make sure they never return.

I am not suggesting that you purposely advertise the back button by putting text near it saying ‘click me’, or explaining to your visitor what a back button does, because the chances are they will already know. But here are some ideas to help turn your back button into a slightly more positive space on your website.

1) Place your branding near the back button
Most people will not need to look at the back button when they click it, but if you place your brand up there it is likely to catch their attention as they leave, advertising your site a little.

2) Make sure your back button works
There’s nothing worse than clicking on a link that doesn’t work, especially if this is a back button! Try to also make sure that your site logo is clickable. Any other text elements in the top left hand area of your site should preferably be clickable too, and lead to different places on our site.

3) Find out where your visitor is from.
I don’t mean you have to chat with every customer and get to know them, and where they are from, but make sure you know how they ended up on our site. Most will get there via search engine, so if you use a server log, you can find this out for sure.

If you know what they are going back to, you can talk about this right at the top of the page, possibly with dynamic elements that only display if you have come in from a certain area. For example, someone who has found your site via a search engine, you may include details like how to search on the pages of your site to get them to stay a little longer.