The Traffic acquisition page shows that organic search makes up the majority of traffic to NWTC’s site, with 161 thousand sessions. Direct search is slightly less, sitting at 110 thousand sessions. This may be due in part to an issue the NWTC website has wherein entering only “nwtc.edu” causes the page to timeout. Most browsers have the capability to take a user to their destination simply through the shorthand version of the URL, but for NWTC this is not the case. A user must either type out “www.nwtc.edu” or “nwtc.edu/” to visit the homepage.

While this is not a major problem, it almost certainly inhibits some users who wish to quickly direct to the NWTC homepage, and adds frustration to the user experience. Fixing whatever is causing this error can lead to a higher number of direct traffic visitors, and simplify what should be the easiest step of accessing a web page: navigating to it.