Even if your website looks fantastic, technical faults can break trust and trigger user frustration from the first interaction, driving visitors away before they’ve even considered your offering.
Welcome to the second of our four-part exploration of user pain points – the obstacles that derail even the best-designed websites. For marketing managers concerned with results, it’s important to understand that user pain points aren’t just about what’s visible on the page; sometimes, the most damaging problems occur beneath the surface and go unnoticed until it’s too late. Technical user pain points are errors and inefficiencies in your website’s foundation that quietly chip away at user trust and satisfaction.
Every organisation’s technical priorities are different, which is why we use tailored audits and in-depth expertise to surface the technical pain points that matter most for your site. In this post, we’ll identify the most common culprits; no jargon, just clear guidance designed to kick-start your thinking to deliver a seamless experience at every step.
Common UX technical issues
Slow page loading
With high speed home and mobile connections, user patience is short these days. Anything beyond a brief pause feels like a malfunction; many industry sources state that you should aim to keep key pages comfortably loading in under three seconds for best results1. Every additional second of loading time exponentially increases abandonment rates, with users forming negative mental impressions of your brand’s reliability and professionalism before content even appears.
Unoptimised images and media
The vast majority of the data transferred to load a full website is made up of images and media. Large, unoptimised files make your site slower to load, punishing mobile users and inflating platform costs. Large media files particularly impact users on slower connections or limited data plans, creating a disjointed experience that delivers a poor experience, whilst unnecessarily increasing your infrastructure expenses.
Broken links and 404 errors
There’s nothing worse than a broken or missing page for a user. They break the narrative and can signal neglect, undermining trust faster than almost any UX metric. Broken links interrupt user flow and create immediate doubt about your site’s reliability, with each error reinforcing the impression that your business lacks attention to quality and detail.
Server errors and connectivity faults
Any sort of technical error seriously sabotages websites by blocking the completion of tasks. Technical failures during critical moments, such as checkout or form submission transform potential customers into frustrated detractors, who may never return. This can also contribute to much longer-term impressions of your brand that are hard to recover from.
Poor caching and content delivery
Failing to leverage browser caching or a CDN effectively means the same asset that makes up your website is transferred repeatedly, needlessly lengthening each trip back to your site. Inefficient content delivery creates cumulative performance penalties that compound with each user interaction, making your entire platform feel sluggish and unresponsive compared to optimised competitors who will be able to handle much larger amounts of concurrent traffic, and have faster loading sites.
Turning technical pain points into opportunities
Addressing technical issues can quickly help boost sales and deliver a significant ROI, but it’s not the end of the story. Join us for the third instalment of our four-part series on UX pain points where we expose an often underestimated set of stumbling blocks: those that break down communication and clarity for your users. By sharing the hard-earned lessons we’ve gained helping businesses overcome these pain points, we’ll help you unlock both immediate improvements and long-term resilience.
Are you ready to unlock your websites full potential?
Our expert team specialise in comprehensive UX audits that identify hidden revenue leaks and deliver prioritised action plans. Discover how our bespoke research processes can unlock your website’s full potential and drive measurable business results.
Article reference sources
1) BrowserStack – How fast should a Website Load in 2025?