Reduce Rage Clicks By With A More Responsive Website
What are rage clicks, and what you can do to prevent them? This article explains how slow interactions can cause users to become frustrated and how you can improve your website performance.
What is a rage click?
Rage clicks happens when users interact with a website and don't get quick visual feedback confirming their click or tap took effect. As a result, visitors click repeatedly in frustration, waiting for the page to respond.
This poor user experience can be caused by poor page performance or due to the user misunderstanding how the interface works. But either way, as a website operator it's your job to notice when visitors struggle and look for ways to make your website better.
How to fix rage clicks
What you need to do to prevent user frustration on your website depends on why there is no response to the interaction.
Slow UI responses due to poor performance
If your website responds to the interaction far more slowly than the user expects, then you need to reduce the delay before the interaction is acknowledged.
Delays usually come from one of two causes:
- CPU processing on the browser main thread
- Resources loading slowly over the network
In both cases you can either speed up those processes, or provide temporary acknowledgment by displaying a spinner or other indication that the website is processing the interaction.
Users interacting with non-responsive elements ("dead clicks")
If users interact with UI elements that are not interactive that suggests something is confusing them. Look for concrete examples of where rage clicks happen and what the visitor might be looking to achieve by clicking on the element.
Ultimately there are two solutions:
- Update your user interface so it's clear that the element is not interactive
- Make the element interactive so it does what users are expecting of it already
Range clicks and Google's Interaction to Next Paint metric
Google has defined the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric to measure how quickly website respond to user input. It can tell you if visitors have poor experience on your website, and is also a search result ranking factor. To provide a good experiences, pages should responds to interactions within 200 milliseconds.
Rage clicks can make INP scores worse: Now instead of handling one interaction, the browser has to process multiple queued-up events! This increases the processing time for the interaction.
In the diagram above you can also see the "Input Delay" component of INP. This measures how much interactions are delayed by background tasks that are already in progress on the page. Rage click could happen even to UI elements that normally respond quickly to interactions, if the browser is busy when the interaction starts.
See how responsive your website is for visitors
DebugBear's real-user monitoring product can help you understand how well your website performs for your visitors.
You can see what page elements users interact with, and how quickly your website responds.
You can also dive more deeply into specific visitor interactions to see what specific JavaScript files caused a delay.
For example, teh breakdown below shows that most of the delay comes from code loaded through Google Tag Manager.
On top of that, you also get a high-level breakdown of visitor experience across your industry, based on Google's Chrome User Experience report.
Find out how you compare to your competitors and if your site is improving or getting worse.
Monitor Page Speed & Core Web Vitals
DebugBear monitoring includes:
- In-depth Page Speed Reports
- Automated Recommendations
- Real User Analytics Data