Why people leave your website.

Attracting visitors to your website is hard enough. What is frustrating is after achieving a visit, they leave straight away. There could be many reasons for this, and taking into account my own experiences I’m going to list a few things that make me leave a site.

Terrible navigation.

•  Image links that are hard to understand exactly what they are and what they are leading to.
•  Links that are scattered around the page.
•  Main links that are inside body text.

Always group your navigation in areas consistently on every page, don’t forget that a simple to understand navigation should be intuitive and easily understood.

Too many advertisements.

• Don’t make the ad the first thing you see when entering your site.
• Don’t let them overtake the majority of the content of the page.
• Pop-up ads are really annoying. 

Although it can be a good revenue stream, overuse can drive your visitors away. Just be sensible and make them as unobtrusive as possible.

 Bad structure of content.

•  Give an introduction to your content, if it’s not what visitors are looking for, let them realise quickly, and search your site for what they do want.
• Don’t distribute the content across multiple pages .
• Don’t make the content hard to find. (especially contact info) 

Place content in groups of similar content and make it easy to see, maybe use a highlighted bold title or keyword.

Annoying use of Video or Music.

•  Don’t automatically play videos when the page loads; give visitors the option to view them, but only if they wish to.
•  Don’t bombard visitors with music that is either to loud or annoying.

We all like to choose what content we want to listen to or view when visiting a site; don’t impose yourself on your visitors too much. If you must play a video, give a simple option to stop it before the visitor gets frustrated.

These are a few of the things that give me a less than pleasant user experience. Hopefully avoiding some will help your site perform better and assist in reducing your bounce rate.

Is there anything else you would like to add to the list?

Long registration forms, boring content, gaudy colour schemes, or even typos. Let me know what annoys you and makes you leave a site and I’ll add to the list on my next post.

Contact Us if you are having trouble with your bounce rate and would like a free site evaluation to help give your visitors a better user experience.