Reasons Why Visitors Are Leaving Your Website

It is quite fulfilling to have people appreciate your work in your line of business. This can be through likes, comments, tweets and sales. It is however, getting harder everyday to get this appreciation and the attention you want from your website visitors. We live in an era where information is readily available and visitors only skim through content to get what they want. For this reason, keeping them on the site for a few seconds is a difficult affair. This is why you need to know the reasons why visitors are leaving your website.

First, keep in mind that whatever content you have on the site must be enticing enough to make the visitors want to stick around.  You need something that will convince them that your website is worth their time. According to a recent study visitors leave a website in about 10 to 20 seconds. If you consider the amount of information on a website, this is a very short period. The following are some of the reasons why a visitor would want to leave your site that fast creating a bounce rate that is not good for business.

1. Your Website Is Too Slow

According to information by Kissmetrics, about 47% of visitors expect websites to load in under 2 seconds and 40% will find an alternative if the site takes over 3 seconds to load. Prior to looking at more studies that involve the loading speed let us look at the expectations of the visitor within the loading time. James Nielsen, in his book, Usability Engineering, breaks down the important time limits occurring in delays between the action of the user and the response of the app.

a) 0.1 Second –In cases where the application responds almost instantaneously to the action of the user, there is a direct manipulation image. In most cases, the user will think that the action was not generated by the computer but instead by their action. This direct manipulation elements is important in the user’s engagement.

b) 1 Second – This time will create a feeling of the computer generating the results instead of the user. Though this is the case, they will still be focusing on their thoughts. This means they will still retain the sense of being in control though on a lower scale. If it’s a web page, it should take 1 second to load so that the user has a sense of control and feels like they can easily and freely navigate.

c) 10 Seconds – This is a long period that will take away any feeling of control that they might have left. Their minds will mostly wander and in most cases, they will leave the site. If your site takes more than this period to load, then giving an indication of the progress will go a long way in helping the situation. This is because they will know exactly what to expect and not just wait blindly.

It does not matter how fresh or how interesting the content on your website is, people will always grow out of waiting for the website to load. If your competitors have fast sites, your users will go there.

When ranking sites Google will always consider the speed at which your site loads. Google is pro users and this means that it is always looking for sites that give the users a great experience. Loading speed is an important factor in the user’s experience which explains its importance in Google ranking.

Amazon had an analysis of their web performance in relation to the sales using A/B tests. They found out that there was a 1% decrease in conversion for every 100 milliseconds delay in loading. Walmart reported a 2% increase in traffic on their site with a reduction of delay with 1 second. For every decrease of load time with 100 milliseconds, there was a 1% increase in conversion.

According to multiple studies, the period people can wait for a website or page to load is becoming shorter every day. People are becoming impatient faster and this means that any slight delay will see them leave your website and find an alternative which most probably belongs to a direct competitor.

2. Problems With The Website Layout

If your website’s structure is disorganized, you will be dealing with a high bounce rate quite often. A quick revamp can deal with a number of problems. Always keep in mind that most people will just scan through the content and not read everything word for word. In their short stay on the website, they expect to be in a position to grab the key elements in the content without struggling. The elements they gather with the scan are crucial in the decision they make next.

There are many principles in the world of design and not implementing them might be the reason behind people leaving too soon. For instance, if you have a visual hierarchy, it is a clear indication to the user that you want them to prioritize some content on the page.

William Hicks through His Hicks’ law explains that the user’s reaction rate is direction proportional to the options you present them. If you have a blog that carries many different articles, having a filtering system will eliminate distractions and give your audience a chance to quickly find what they are searching for.

3. The Auto Play Problem

For most visitors, videos that play on their own are irritants. The visitor’s goal now becomes finding the video or the tab with the video and closing it. As you build your website, make sure you think about where the visitor will be when they land on the website. If they are not at the comfort of their home or are in places where watching videos is inappropriate, chances are that they will close that tab and forget about your site.

We talked about control and how much it means to a user. They want to have it and when the video plays on its own, it takes away this control. If they are listening to their favorite song when visiting the site, you might give them a reason to close your site and this means a high bounce rate and no conversion. If there is something playing, it is important that you give the user an obvious place to pause the video or audio. The best thing is to avoid these videos and audios. If you have to have them, it is a good idea to give the control to the user.

If you want to know how annoying these autoplay things can be look at the case of Facebook. After 24 hours of launching the autoplay ads, there were millions of searches related to how to block the annoying ads. If you do your own research you might find a connection between users staying and leaving a web site in relation to autoplay content. There are many people who will find them irritating and instead of finding where they are playing from to pause them, they will completely leave the website or close down the pages.

4. Boring Content

As mentioned, to get the visitor to stick around, you need to create interesting content that will keep them glued to the screen. Most people concentrate on the home page and forget all about the other pages. The funny thing is that most visitors will not enter the website through this page. Statistics show that people find websites through search engine results, links on other sites and social networks. The truth is that the homepage is no longer the center of attraction like it was a while ago. Blogs and articles are becoming a great attraction and this tells you that each page should be up to date and compelling enough to keep the visitor on the site for more engagement.

You should strive to provide neutral content that does not include complex words. People do not want to read jargon because it will confuse them. If you are selling something, explain what it is and how the user can benefit from it using simple words. A thorough article will do a lot of good in not only keeping the visitor on the site but in the decision they make in relation to purchasing. If the content is react-able and relatable, you can rest assured that the conversion rate will always be on the higher side.

5. Dormant Blog

Having an inactive blog is another main reason why people might be leaving your website as soon as they arrive. Well, if your visitors have nothing fresh to read, they will leave, visit one more time and if there is still nothing, they might just leave forever. You might want to consider having posting schedules and sticking by them.

Though there is no study that shows the perfect frequency of posting, it is important that you avoid keeping your visitors waiting for too long. Sometimes posting too often can actually be irritating for some people. This might also result in filler content that most visitors will not like. If you post less often, your readers might go somewhere else where there is fresh content. You will have a hard time maintaining a loyal following if they have nothing to read.

The goal of a website owner is to attract traffic. But this is not enough in business if the visitors do not stay long enough to get the information and buy something. You need time to convince a person to buy and this can only be achieved through keeping them on the site longer. Now that you know the reasons why most people leave, you can make the necessary adjustments to prevent a high bounce rate. A visitor is not visiting your site to live in a few seconds, they are looking for solutions and you should show them the solution to their problem.