To reduce friction on an author site, remove anything that stands between a visitor's reason for coming and the page that satisfies it: fewer competing choices on the home page, plain link labels, fast-loading pages, no overlays before people have read anything, and controls that work for every reader on every device. Start by listing the three or four things visitors most often want (your latest book or essay, your archive, your bio, a way to contact you) and make each one obvious from the first screen. Then measure speed and accessibility against published standards rather than gut feeling.
"Friction" here means any effort a visitor spends that does not get them closer to what they wanted: hesitating over vague menus, waiting for a slow image, closing a pop-up, pinching to zoom. This guide works through the main sources of friction on writers' and critics' websites and the documented fixes for each.
Know what visitors come for
Friction is always relative to a goal. An editor wants to see whether you can write about a subject; a reader wants the new book; a festival organiser wants a short bio and a photo. Before changing anything, write down the four or five most common visitor goals and check how many steps each one takes today, starting from your home page and from a typical article page.
Your contact form, newsletter signup and analytics (if you use them) give clues about which goals are real. So do the questions people email you. If several people have asked where to buy a book that is linked on the home page, the link is not as obvious as you thought.
Cut choices, not content
Every option on a page costs a little attention. Hick's law, summarised on the Laws of UX site, states that the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. Nielsen Norman Group's guide to minimising cognitive load makes a similar point in practical terms: avoid visual clutter such as redundant links and irrelevant images, build on the layouts and labels people already know from other sites, and offload decisions where you can with smart defaults.
On an author site that usually means:
- one main navigation with a handful of familiar labels ("Books", "Essays", "Reviews", "About", "Contact")
- one primary call to action on the home page, not three equal ones
- the archive kept complete, but one click away rather than spread across the home page
- no duplicated links to the same destination under different names
Familiar labels beat clever ones. "Writing" or "Essays" tells a visitor more than "Words" or "Dispatches", however much you like the latter.
Do not chase a click count
A common piece of advice says every page should be reachable in two or three clicks. Nielsen Norman Group explains in The 3-Click Rule for Navigation Is False that the rule is an arbitrary rule of thumb not backed by data, and that following it tends to push sites towards overly broad navigation menus.
What matters is that each click feels like progress. A visitor who clicks "Reviews", then "Theatre", then a specific review has taken three confident steps. A visitor faced with forty undifferentiated links on one page has taken one click and is now stuck. Use descriptive section names and link labels so people can predict what they will find, and they will happily click more than once.
Descriptive links also help screen reader users. WCAG 2.2 requires that the purpose of each link can be determined from the link text or its context, so "Read my review of the new production" works where "Read more" repeated ten times does not.
Make pages load quickly
Waiting is friction in its purest form, and it is measurable. Google's web.dev guidance on Core Web Vitals sets three thresholds for a good experience: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, each measured at the 75th percentile of page loads (checked October 2026). Google's page on page experience explains how these signals relate to Search.
Author sites are mostly text, so they can be fast. The usual culprits are:
Large images. Book covers and author photos are often uploaded straight from a camera or a publisher's print file. Resize them to the size they are displayed at and compress them. MDN's guide to image file types notes that WebP offers much better compression than PNG or JPEG, and that lossy AVIF images are around 50% smaller than JPEG at similar visual quality.
Layout shifts. Text that jumps as images load makes people lose their place or tap the wrong link. The web.dev guide to optimising CLS advises always including width and height attributes on images and video, or reserving space with CSS aspect-ratio.
Third-party extras. Embedded social feeds, multiple font families, chat widgets and several analytics tools all add requests. Keep only what you use and would miss.
Test on a mid-range phone on mobile data, not only on your desktop connection.
Hold back the pop-ups
Overlays that appear before a visitor has read anything are among the most disliked patterns on the web. Nielsen Norman Group's article on popups reports that most overlays appear at the wrong time and interrupt users during critical tasks, and recommends not prompting before interaction. Google's Search Central guidance on interstitials and dialogs says not to obscure the entire page with interstitials, notes that intrusive elements can make it hard for search engines to understand content, and recommends banners that take up only a small fraction of the screen instead. Legally required consent dialogs and age gates are treated as mandatory.
For a writer, the practical version is simple. Put the newsletter signup at the end of articles, where a reader who has just finished a piece is most likely to want more, and in the footer or on a dedicated page. If you do use an overlay, show it after someone has read for a while, make it easy to close, and do not show it again on every page.
Build accessibility in from the start
Many accessibility requirements are friction fixes that benefit everyone. A few from WCAG 2.2 that author sites commonly miss:
- Contrast. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background at Level AA. Pale grey text on white, a popular "literary" look, often fails.
- Target size. Links and buttons should be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or spaced so that small targets do not crowd each other. This matters on link lists and footers full of social icons.
- Visible focus. Keyboard users need to see where they are; WCAG's focus visible criterion requires a mode in which the keyboard focus indicator is visible.
- Comfortable reading. The Level AAA visual presentation criterion recommends lines no wider than 80 characters, text that is unjustified (ragged right), and line spacing of at least one and a half within paragraphs. You do not have to meet every AAA criterion, but these three cost nothing on a text-led site.
Give book covers and author photos meaningful text alternatives, and use real headings in long essays so readers can skim and jump.
Run a friction audit
Once the obvious fixes are in, test with people. Ask two or three people who have not used your site to complete specific tasks: find your most recent review, buy your latest book, find out whether you take commissions. Watch without helping and note every hesitation. Then repeat the same tasks yourself on a phone, with the keyboard only, and on a slow connection.
A simple audit sheet for each task:
- Starting page and goal
- Number of steps taken, and any wrong turns
- Anything that loaded slowly or moved
- Anything that had to be dismissed or zoomed
- The fix, and the date you made it
Repeat the audit after any redesign and at least once a year. Friction creeps back as you add new books, new links and new tools, so a short annual check keeps the site as easy to use as it was on the day you launched it. More tool-neutral guides for author websites are collected on uniblog.org.
