Caution: As a website owner, it is important for you to know about a growing epidemic on the World Wide Web that could be affecting your visitors’ engagement with your website.

The Diagnosis: The recent outbreak is festering among frequent Internet users, and has been diagnosed as Password Fatigue — a feeling that is experienced by Web users who are required to remember an excessive number of passwords as part of their daily routines. The Symptoms: While this epidemic might not sound serious, the symptoms could prove to be business-threatening. Warning signs include high site abandonment rates, low engagement metrics and even an increase in inconsistent purchasing actions.

The Cure: Thankfully, the remedy for password fatigue is easy to administer. The solution is called social login, and thanks to a handful of providers, it can be easily integrated into a website to provide site visitors with the option to login through existing profiles from sites such as Facebook, Google or Yahoo.

Not only does social login benefit the consumer who no longer has to remember multiple passwords, but it also benefits website owners because minimizing login barriers leads to higher site engagement rates, an increase in conversions, as well as more accurate consumer data that is derived from social profiles.

Janrain is one vendor that offers social login within its Engage platform. The basic package, which is optimal for bloggers and hobbyists, is free — while the plus, pro and enterprise packages range from $10 a month to more than $1,000 a year, depending on the size of business and website it is being used for. The Janrain Engage platform also offers social sharing options, valuable user profile data and demographics, mobile support and social analytics.

And implementing social login to your site could be critical because research reveals that 86 percent of Web visitors have left a site when prompted to register, and 88 percent admit to inputting false information on website registration forms, according to Janrain VP of marketing Bill Piwonka.

“Seventy-seven percent of consumers recently reported preferring to have an option to use an existing ID, such as a Google, Twitter or Facebook account,” says Piwonka. “By offering a simple one-click registration using a social identity, our clients not only get clean, accurate information, but also increase conversion rates by as much as 30 percent.”

Janrain isn’t the only company engaging in the fight against Password Fatigue. Social media tool provider Gigya also presents a social login solution within its Social Identity Management platform, which includes a cloud-hosted database for storing consumer social identity data, user interaction forms for maximizing registrations, single sign-on, and can integrate user data into marketing tools — such as email campaigns and advertising networks.

Gigya also offers a suite of social tools including website plugins for comments, sharing, activity feeds, live chat, ratings and reviews. These plugins allow site visitors to interact with and share content while using their social identities, which can result in valuable referral traffic.

With social sign on, Gigya has seen its clients’ site registration rates increase by up to 40 percent. In addition, visitors that sign on with social login prove to be five times more likely to make a purchase and, on average, spend 10 percent more on purchases than non-social users.

Social login also provides businesses with valuable and important consumer data, according to Gigya senior marketing manager Victor White.

“By gaining permission-based access to users’ social profile information, businesses can market to their users like never before,” says White. “Imagine being able to send tailored emails, via email marketing platforms, to users based on traits like the universities they attended or the musical artists they like. Social data can also be put to use by feeding it directly into content/product recommendation engines like Baynote or Certona.

“Ultimately,” he adds, “what social data gives businesses is a level of user-insight that has never before been possible. And all this data can be accessed via social login.”

Prognosis: Combating Password Fatigue by including social login on your website can prove to be a smart move that won’t only benefit your site’s visitors, but also your bottom line. It provides your website with a faster and more seamless way for visitors to login, can result in higher engagement and conversion metrics, and provides businesses with detailed and valuable consumer information and insights.