5 Reasons Your Visitors Are Leaving Your Website

Your website is designed to pull in visitors, engage with them, and then eventually convert them into new customers, but what if it is really causing your visitors to leave your site and do business with your competition?

Attracting high quality traffic to your website is a time consuming and very costly process, so the last thing you want to do is cause your visitors to quickly leave. Often times it is caused by something simple that can be changed to eliminate that problem.

Here are five reasons that your website could be potentially pushing away new visitors, and causing your business to lose revenue.

1. Poor User Navigation

Your visitors must be able to land on your site and quickly identify how to move around your website, and they need to be able to do this regardless of what kind of device they are using to browse your website. Mobile, tablet, and laptop/desktop screens of all sizes must all have a great user experience.

If they can’t locate your menu or there isn’t a clearly defined purpose they will become aggravated and leave. You could have the best content, products, or services, but if the visitor can’t easily locate them your website isn’t doing its job.

Solution: Have one single navigation menu that is easy to access and clearly defined. Make sure that your menu is responsive and provides desktop, mobile, and tablet users alike with an effortless navigation experience.

To get complete insight as to what your visitors are doing once they land on your website use a tool like Crazy Egg, a heat map tool that helps you identify the most popular areas of your website. It also shows your how far down visitors are scrolling, what parts of the website are working and which are not, and also what your users are doing on your pages.

2. Animation & Audio

Years ago many web developers felt that music and an abundance of animation was the key to success. Nobody wants to hear cheesy elevator music or be forced to watch animation before they are able to access the meat of your website. Web design is constantly evolving, and music and animation aren’t what your visitors are expecting (or wanting) to encounter when they visit your website. This also slows down your load time.

Solution: Focus on a very simple website design that loads fast and allows the visitor to immediately identify the product or service you are selling. If it takes your visitors a long time to figure out your website they will most likely leave quickly and visit another website.

3. Slow Webpage Load Time

Have you ever landed on a website and just sat there waiting…and waiting…and waiting some more for the page to load? It is extremely annoying, and you probably never returned to that website again because of that terrible experience.

According to KISSmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Solution: Run a Google PageSpeed Insights report and GTmetrix performance report for your website. These free tools not only give you a score and grade, but they also provide suggestions to help you improve the speed and performance of your website.

4. Lacking Fresh Content

You could have a fast loading website, with a pleasant design and easy navigation, but if your website isn’t updated on a regular basis with fresh content you could still be pushing potential customers away. If a potential customer revisits your website you want them to be welcomed with fresh content.

Solution: A blog that is updated on a regular basis is a great way to ensure there is always something new for returning visitors to find value in. The frequency in which you update it will vary greatly depending on how often your visitors are returning and your ability and budget to keep your website updated. Once create a publishing schedule it is important that you stick to it, whether it is daily blog posts or weekly updates. Make sure that your visitors always have something new to engage with.

5. Forced Registration & Pop-Ups That Load Immediately

Your website also acts as a lead generation tool, but that doesn’t mean you should hassle or out-and-out aggravate your visitors by asking for their information before you provide them with anything of value.

The use of pop-ups that display immediately after the page loads or locking blog content and requiring an email registration to view the content will push your visitors away. If you provide useful content and information your visitors will want to sign up for your updates or mailing list to stay connected with your brand because they see value in what you offer.

Solution: Focus on providing value to your visitors and your leads will grow naturally. If you want to attempt to convert visitors before they leave your website use a pop-up that features exit-intent technology, displaying the offer once the visitor has decided to leave your website. According to Bounce Exchange, 70% – 96% of the visitors abandoning your site will never return, so an exit-pop is a good way to try to convert some of those visitors that will never return.

Your website is one of the biggest assets of your business. Make sure that you aren’t outing your revenue opportunity at a disadvantage by falling victim to those five common mistakes. Focus on providing a great user experience before anything else.

5 Reasons Your Visitors Are Leaving Your Website