You know the value of your website. You spend a lot of time and energy improving it to get people to visit it.
It can be difficult enough to get people to visit your website, but it is even more difficult to get them to stay and explore it. Increasing the chances of conversions is essential.
It is difficult to convince visitors that your website is worth their time when there is so much competition and information readily available online.
The exit rate and bounce rate help to measure the number of visitors who are leaving your website. The bounce rate is the percentage of people who left your website after a single-page session, while the exit rate is the percentage of people who left the last page in the session.
A high exit rate is an indication that there are problem areas on those pages. This high bounce rate indicates that there are very few users who are engaged with your page, which is likely a sign of either poor page quality or low-quality incoming traffic.
Website owners want their visitors to stay on their site. It is best to know the possible reasons why visitors are leaving your website.
1. Loading Speed Problem
These studies have shown that people who use websites expect them to load within 2 seconds. People like to feel in control because it gives them a sense of predictability.
If your website loads quickly, your audience will feel like their actions are being responded to, which gives them a sense of control. If your website takes a long time to load, your visitors will no longer feel in control.
Hence, their minds wander, they lose patience and leave. Other similar websites to yours are available (your competitors). They perceive your slow website as not functioning. Because of this, you have sent your visitors to your competitor’s websites.
There are a few tools you can use to check how fast your website is. Some examples are PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, Pingdom Speed Test, Bitcatcha Website Speed Checker, etc.
Also, Google takes speed as a ranking signal. The higher you rank on search results, the more visible you become, and people will see you as more relevant.
You can look into the images/videos on your website. You should avoid using large images or videos on your website, as they can slow it down. Use optimally-sized images and videos.
To improve your website’s performance, you should optimize your code and enable caching. Your website may need a better web hosting solution; don’t forget to check your current hosting plan’s capabilities.
2. Bombarding Ads on Your Visitors
Ads are not the primary reason people visit websites. Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. If you are greeted by advertising as soon as you land on a website, won’t you be annoyed?
The business doesn’t seem to be interested in helping people, only making money. This means that people see these ads as more of a bother than anything else.
Additionally, if you place ads in excess on your website to the point where each click produces pop-up ads, you should not be surprised if visitors leave your site.
Although you cannot remove your ads, you can place them more strategically. Do not irritate your audience. This means that you should try to limit the number of ads. Arrange the images so that they do not take up more space on the website than the content they are related to.
3. Unattractive Design and Layout
People judge books by their covers; it is sad but true. People are less likely to stay on your website if it has an unattractive design and poor visuals. Additionally, many people believe that a website’s design impacts how trustworthy it is.
Design truly matters with the website’s layout too. Your audience doesn’t have a lot of time; they won’t read everything you wrote in depth. Instead, your audience scans your content.
If your website is difficult to navigate or overloaded with information, your visitors will have trouble understanding what your business is about. As such, they will give up and look elsewhere.
When you are designing your website, it is important to use a simple and clean website template to create an optimized approach. The visuals and graphics you use in your marketing should be appealing and relate to your business. The main objective when giving a speech is to make sure that you have the audience’s full attention and that you are speaking to their emotions.
Every website page needs to have a straightforward and consistent layout so that it’s easy to understand. Menu items should be easy to understand, and the content should not be randomly placed.
Taglines/headers must display the business intent correctly. Though you may have to put in some extra effort, redesigning your website will be worth it in the end.
4. The Navigation Issue
Did you ever visit a website where you felt like you were in an endless maze of clicks, trying to reach your destination? You only need a few clicks to lose your audience. A website that is both beautifully designed and easy to navigate is the best of both worlds.
Patience is a virtue. Many people can’t afford to spend the time to double-check things. This means that if your website is difficult to navigate, your visitors will leave.
Firstly, you have to know your targeted audience’s needs. Then ensure the related content is easily within reach. Don’t make users go through a lot of different menus to find what they’re looking for.
Otherwise, you’ll only frustrate them to leave. Your website should have a clear, easy-to-understand hierarchy, with visible menus that are easy to use and properly categorized.
Organize your website so that everything is easily accessible from your email. Your website should be easy to navigate.
5. Security Is an Issue
People are becoming more security-conscious by the day. Thank you to the hackers who never stop looking for ways to exploit vulnerabilities on the internet. People leave a website when they feel that it is not secure. This is usually because they do not see the standard security measures that should be in place.
For example, if your website does not have an HTTPS, your visitors will not stay because they know their browser communication is not encrypted.
Security concerns are real. They can frighten your audience away. There is no point in collecting personal information from them because they will never sign up for anything. Hence, beef up your website’s security.
Secure websites show your audience that you’re serious about your business and that they can trust you.
The ‘HTTPS’ on a website indicates that it has an SSL Certificate, which is necessary for all websites. Your website will have a padlock icon next to the ‘HTTPS’ to show that it is secure. The communications are encrypted and safe from prying eyes.
If your audience feels more secure, they are more likely to stay on your website. Some web hosts offer a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. However, other certificate providers such as Thawte, GlobalSign, or DigiCert can be explored.
One way to help protect your website is to run security monitoring programs. These programs can help you keep track of what is happening on your site and identify potential security threats. You will be notified of anything that could potentially lead to a disaster so that you can take the necessary precautions. Remember, prevention is better than cure.
6. Site is Not Optimized for Mobile
The growth of mobile web users has been exponential in recent years. If your website is not compatible with this change, it does not matter how good your content is.
It’s very frustrating when you try to visit a website that isn’t optimised for your screen size. Not only do you have to constantly zoom in and out, but you also have to keep track of where you are zoomed in and out to. Make the user experience enjoyable on any device.
You may have heard of ‘Mobilegeddon’, Google’s latest search algorithm update, which is designed to penalize websites that are not mobile-friendly. If a website is not designed for mobile devices, it will probably get less traffic from internet searches.
Not only is it dangerous to have a website that is not mobile-friendly, but it is also likely that the website will have a very high bounce rate because so many people use the internet on their mobile device.
It’s important to make sure your website is mobile-friendly in order to reach the largest possible audience. Google has provided a guide for optimizing your site for mobile devices. The guide covers topics such as choosing a domain name, configuring your server, and designing your site for different screen sizes.
7. Not Enough Content
When you read a title that sounds good but the content doesn’t deliver, it’s disappointing. You need to have quality content to keep people’s attention once you have gotten it.
Evaluate the content on your website to see if it is effective. If it is thin then add more to it. Use lists to break up text. Include photos and videos for visual interest Images. It is important for content to be spaced out so that people can scan through it quickly.
But simply adding content is not enough. It is important to make sure that your writing is relevant, well-written, and free of errors. This will help ensure that your readers will take your writing seriously and will be more likely to trust what you have to say.
8. No Clear Value Proposition
An article in Digital Tonic recently explained this very well. Here’s what they wrote…
When a person visits your website, their primary thought is likely “What can this website do for me?” or “What can I gain from this website?”
If you don’t let your visitors know what your site is about and how you can help them, they probably won’t stay long enough to become subscribers or customers.
More often than not, websites create header statements that are difficult to understand and read. These statements are more like marketing slogans than actual value propositions. Within three seconds, you need to snare the viewer’s focus and straightforwardness will guarantee that they will linger and explore further.
If you want to reduce the number of people who leave your site without viewing any content (bounce rate), make sure you have a clear value proposition.
9. Auto-play Video and Audio
Did you ever leave a site because the music or video annoyed you? People want to have control over when they watch videos or listen to audio recordings.
In the end, it’s just really annoying. You should disable auto-play for your videos. Your visitors will thank you for it.
10. Content is Outdated
If you have old content on your site, you’re likely to lose visitors. If you are regularly posting new content and have plenty of old archives, you are in good shape. Make sure that visitors see updated posts and not outdated ones.
People are interested in reading new content. They are interested in the most recent and most excellent information.
An ideal frequency of new content depends on your niche. When thinking about how often to post on social media, you should also consider that posting too much can be irritating and may cause your followers to unsubscribe.
An editorial calendar can be extremely helpful. It is possible to plan your content in advance for a longer time period. By posting frequently and planning your topics in advance, you can ensure a wide variety of content.
11. Hard to Read
Gone are the days of small fonts. People don’t like having to zoom in and out all the time while they’re using their browser. There are many factors to consider when designing a website, such as colors, font family, and so on.
Real difficulties begin when visitors start reading your content and realize they have to take some effort to read your content because the font is unreadable. This is something that needs to be fixed as soon as possible.
Choose a font that is both easy to read and “eye-friendly”. You might not have realized it, but there’s an entire area of design that’s devoted to making text easy to read. It’s called typography.
The fact that typography exists proves how important readability is. If you can’t decide which font to use for your website, look for help on this topic from an online resource, such as Hubspot’s How to Choose the Right Fonts for Your Marketing article.
