From freeing up the front desk to empowering your community members, online registration offers many, many benefits. Of course, this isn’t exactly breaking news!
But even with the understanding that online registration can make our lives easier, there are still many who resist embracing this self-serve technology. In fact, in our 2025 Parks and Recreation Trends Guide, we shared that 30% of leadership respondents reported that self-service is not the primary registration method for their community members.
This shows that, despite its convenience, many organizations still struggle with the adoption of online registration.
Why? Well, there are actually a few common pitfalls that your agency may have fallen into! And each one has the power to disrupt your online registration experience.
Want to learn more about 7 Common Online Registration Pitfalls & How to Avoid Them? Join Datis Mohsenipour, VP of Marketing at Xplor Recreation, on April 29, 2025, and find out how to avoid the biggest mistakes when it comes to your online registration.
Prefer to read more about it first? In this article, we’ll cover six shocking stats that explain why your online registration efforts may be suffering.
🤳 40 billion online users are on mobile
⏱️ You have 8 seconds to engage web visitors
📊 1-second load times convert 2.5 more visitors
⛔️ 10-second load times increase bounce rates by 90%
👾 Cyberattacks have increased 94% since 2020
💸 Scams are the 2nd highest crime concern in the US
While in theory, online registration should make it easier for customers to sign up for your programs, there are a number of things that can negatively impact their user experience. Learn more about six staggering statistics that shine a light on why some online registration efforts fail.
Your online registration experience needs to work seamlessly across all devices—especially smartphones. After all, mobile devices are how most of your community members interact with the online world.
As recently as 2020, the difference between mobile and desktop usage was not all that different. Yet, by 2023, four times as many people were using their phones to access the internet when compared to desktop computers.
Simply put, 40 billion people are now browsing the internet from mobile—with only 10 billion accessing it from a desktop machine.
If you don’t have a mobile-optimized online registration portal or webpage, it's extremely difficult to properly view your website from a tablet or phone. From tiny text to sentences that disappear off the side of the page, unoptimized webpages can be incredibly frustrating to navigate on a smartphone.
This stat suggests that optimizing your online registration for mobile viewing can help you provide a better user experience. Better online user experience equals more people registering via the internet—from their mobile devices!
💡 Did You Know?
Xplor Recreation’s online registration experience is a mobile-first design, optimized to work seamlessly across all devices. We also offer the only native mobile app of its kind in the parks and recreation industry, providing customers with an incredibly easy-to-use mobile registration experience.
When a visitor lands on your website, many will decide if they will stay or not within eight seconds. In fact, 50% of your visitors will leave if your webpage or online registration does not immediately engage them.
Online user attention spans are short, and your community members are busy. Can you really blame them for not wanting to engage in a web experience that’s hard to navigate and feels like it’s wasting their time?
If you have a confusing website, odds are you will not engage your online visitors within that crucial eight-second window. At least half of them will leave immediately, and the rest likely won’t stick around to figure out how to use your site—never mind register for your programs.
In terms of online registration, a difficult user experience may look like any combination of the following:
🔍 Low priority placement on your website: If online registration isn’t obvious, your visitors probably won’t take the time to try and find it.
🚫 Non-existent registration links: Without links to guide your users to the next stage of the purchasing journey, how are they supposed to know how to access registration?
🙆 Poor call-to-action (CTA) buttons: From buttons without contrast to confusing CTAs, it’s so important to offer your visitors guidance through these links. Without them, many will be quick to exit your site.
When compared to ecommerce sites that load in five seconds, websites that load within a second convert two-and-a-half times more visitors. This means that a faster-loading webpage will likely result in more people taking a desired action on your site—such as registering for a program.
Just four seconds can be the difference between your community registering for programs online and them giving up and going back to the way they have always signed up.
It may seem crazy that just a couple seconds could make or break your online registration efforts. But, again, this supports what we already know—user attention spans are incredibly short, and your customers have busy lives. Simply put, faster websites equal more registrations!
When a visitor comes to your website and only views one page instead of continuing to browse your site, this is called a bounce. A bounce rate is the number of single-page visitor sessions divided by the total number of visitor sessions on your site.
The longer your website takes to load, the more likely your site is to have a higher bounce rate:
👉 A load time of 1-to-3 seconds → 32% increase in bounce rate probability
👉 A load time of 1-to-5 seconds → 90% increase in bounce rate probability
👉 A load time of 1-to-10 seconds → 123% increase in bounce rate probability
Yet another stat about speed—proving once again that online users do not have the patience for poor performing websites. So, if your website doesn’t load efficiently, you’re less likely to have visitors stick around to register online for your programs.
Since 2020, there has been a 94% increase in online phishing and scam activity. Leveraging everything from AI to the fear surrounding the financial crisis, there are ample ways for cyber criminals to work their way into your community members' bank accounts.
Online scams are also becoming more sophisticated and increasingly more difficult to catch.
A number of parks and recreation management software solutions require your community members to leave your website in order to register online for your programs. And many agency websites provide warnings to their visitors who attempt to follow a link to a new site.
This can cause stress for your visitors who may abandon the jump to a new site for fear of falling victim to a cyberattack.
57% of Americans say that they frequently or occasionally worry about getting scammed. This makes phishing schemes the second highest crime concern in the United States.
Similarly to the previous stat about the rise of cyberattacks, Americans’ concern about scams could be harming your online registration efforts. This is especially true if you have an online registration experience that takes your visitors off of your website.
Embedding your registration portal right onto your website is the most effective way to alleviate this fear for your community members. Remove this point of friction by keeping the entire sign-up process on your own site and help boost your registration rate!
💡 Did You Know?
With Xplor Recreation, you can embed your online registration portal directly on your website. This means that your customers can browse, learn more, and—most importantly—register for your programs without ever leaving your site.
Online registration is beneficial for both your staff and your customers. It frees up your employees’ time to help better serve your community members and empowers your customers to manage their own schedules at their convenience.
For more tips on how to improve your efforts, don’t forget to sign up for our upcoming webinar, 7 Common Online Registration Pitfalls & How to Avoid Them, on April 29!