Screen Resolutions – What do your visitors actually see?

Posted: October 9, 2008

When is the last time you looked at your website in different browser resolutions?
If its been a while, maybe these statistics will make you change your mind:

Where Users Click
	Visible Area	Right of Visible Area
Visible Area	76.5%	0.3%
Below Visible Area	23.1	.1%

Source: Weinreich, H., Obendort, H., Herder, E., and M. Mayer, “Off the Beaten Tracks: Exploring Three Aspects of Web Navigation.

Searchers are still clicking ‘above the fold’ in what is visible when your page first loads.

The issue is, we all have different screen resolutions.

W3.org publishes stats on the screen resolutions.

Date	Higher	1024×768	800×600	640×480	Unknown
January 2008	38%	48%	8%	0%	6%
January 2007	26%	54%	14%	0%	6%
January 2006	17%	57%	20%	0%	6%
January 2005	12%	53%	30%	0%	5%
January 2004	10%	47%	37%	1%	5%
January 2003	6%	40%	47%	2%	5%
January 2002	6%	34%	52%	3%	5%
January 2001	5%	29%	55%	6%	5%
January 2000	4%	25%	56%	11%	4%

Just because it’s the published number does not mean that applies to your site.

Here’s a screenshot of Google Analytics for this blog:

Screen Resolutions - Google Analytics_1222962562502

In the past month, this blog has been viewed on 128 different screen resolutions. In addition, the most common screen resolution (1024×768) which normally makes up 48% of all visitors, sees half of that typical number (only 21.87%) for this site.

While more people are scrolling overall, and some companies are ‘debunking the fold’; every time I most actions on a site to below the fold, I see conversion rates drop.

While vertical scrolling is getting some traction, horizontal scrolling is not. Make sure you page does not force individuals to scroll right to view additional content.

It only takes a few minutes of your time. Change your screen resolution, surf your site, make notes of areas to test for different resolutions or areas where you are most likely losing conversions or traffic and need to make some design changes.

One idea is to split test your pages where the major change is layout based upon different screen resolutions before you do any major redesigns.

Another option is to use crazyegg to create a heatmap of where your visitors are clicking and make decisions or tests from that data.

You should have some analytics package installed – don’t forget to use the data!

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