Session Timeouts: A Simple Way To Lose Customers
Here’s a really simple way to lose customers: If they go away from the computer for 10 minutes with your website open & then they come back & try to continue browsing your site, make sure that the next link they click fires up a great big “Sorry, your session has timed out” notice, wipes out their cart & requires them to go right back to your homepage…
Why Interruptive Session Timeouts Are Bad
A few of the key problems of timeouts that interrupt your visitors:
- Lost sales
- Lost potential customers
- Angry existing customers
- A truly awful brand experience
Incredibly, despite those massive problems, a google search of “your session has timed out” returns over 150,000 results.
Aren’t Timeouts Good For Security?
There are situations (banks, loan providers, administrative applications) where it makes sense to automatically drop people out of their accounts & stop them from moving forward. If you’re running an online store however, there is no reason to have a short or interruptive session timeout.
If you’re worried about someone hijacking your customer’s computer, then simply make sure they have to re-enter their password at the point of sale if their session included a long idle period.
If you’re worried about server resources, why not store cart & customer data in a cookie & create ‘invisible’ non-interruptive timeouts?
How To Quickly Gain More Sales & Happier Customers
The good news is that session timeouts are usually controlled from one central place & need only very minor code changes to remove/extend. If you don’t know how to do this yourself, speak to the person who puts together your website & explain exactly why this is a problem:
If your web team insists that timeouts are necessary & can give you good reasons, there are two simple ways to minimise their negative effects:
- Extend the timeout length (session timeouts are usually set to occur after X minutes of inactivity)
- Switch to a non-interruptive timeout, where all important session/cart info has been stored safely - this way the user doesn’t see that the timeout has occurred & they can continue their session as if it had never stopped
