5 Reasons Why People Are Leaving Your Site

Getting a decent amount of traffic to your website is one thing, but it’s actually more important to ensure that visitors to your site are staying on it and navigating their way through it for as long as possible. Retaining readers will help to ensure that they learn as much as possible about your business and exactly what you have to offer. 

As long as they’re engaging with your website in a meaningful way, then you’ll soon reap the rewards in the form of conversions, leads and, ultimately, customers. Therefore, it’s understandable that some companies are becoming frustrated by the inability to retain website visitors. Here are five potential reasons why people are leaving your website too soon, together with some hints and tips to keep visitors engaged for as long as possible.

1. You’re not displaying relevant content

The content you display on your website should revolve solely around relevant keywords. These are important for bringing in organic traffic, but some sites will include keywords simply because they have a high search volume, but they haven’t bothered including the relevant content to back those keywords up. 

Relevant information is incredibly important as this can be used by the reader almost straight away, before they even click on the link that’ll take them to your website. Therefore, they’ll already have a good idea of what to expect when the link to your site opens – another reason why you need relevant content to back up the keywords you’re using.

Once you have the relevant content to back up your keywords, you should optimise the content for those specific keywords and phrases. But before doing that, you need to understand the users’ intent; why would they be coming to your site? Don’t bring them to your website and then leave them to navigate their way around without any direction.

If anything, ensuring they land on a page that displays interesting, relevant content is a quick and sure way of keeping visitors to your site on there for as long as possible. According to a study, 84% of Internet searchers would rather land on a blog or news page than a homepage. 

A blog will instantly have engaging, thought-provoking content on there, which will also be incredibly relevant to what it is they searched for in the first place. If your articles are both informative and interesting, then it’s likely your visitors will stay on your website for longer, perhaps going through all of your blog posts and then deciding to learn more about what it is you do – this can also be encouraged by using a ‘call to action’ (CTA) at the end of each article.

2. Your site isn’t mobile-friendly

According to a study conducted in 2015, mobile views surpassed desktop site views for the very first time that year and those numbers have since remained relatively the same. Google thrives on mobile responsiveness as, according to Statista, mobile traffic accounts for over half of all website traffic across the globe. 

However, mobile design isn’t the easiest thing to get right. You could have a modern, expertly designed website that loads and fits seamlessly onto a desktop computer. But people often forget to adapt their site to be as mobile-friendly as possible. If you don’t take these steps, your website could look messy and lacklustre when viewed on a mobile device.

You should have your website designed to be as mobile-friendly as possible, almost as if it was made for the smaller screen. Loading on a mobile should also be important; ensure visitors can scroll through your site uninterrupted for quick, easy and convenient navigation.

To conclude, a mobile-optimised website should have the following characteristics:

• A responsive design
• Be easy to use
• Have great site speed

3. There isn’t an obvious conversion point

Visitors to your website should be able to see and understand exactly what it is you do from the very first page they land on. They shouldn’t have to excessively scroll all the way down the page to get that basic information. But this is what will help to convert readers into leads and subsequently customers.

If they like and understand exactly what it is you have to offer, then they’ll stay on your website for much longer, perhaps even clicking through other product and service pages in the process. Your sole aim should be to get prospective clients to contact you over your competitors and here’s how you can help to make that happen:

• Highlight the benefits of choosing your business for goods and services
• Have a CTA that tells visitors what they need to do in order to get started
• Display information that conveys what the reader will be gaining by choosing your company over others that offer something similar

4. Your website design is either too complicated or too simplistic

An over-complicated, cluttered or busy website design tends to turn people away and will subsequently make them feel anxious. It’ll be difficult for you to retain visitors if your website design is messy or outdated. The same can also be said for websites that are too simplistic as it can make it look like you haven’t made an effort.

A popular solution to a busy website design is to tone things down slightly. Opt for neutral background colours but you should choose tones that match your brand in order to tie things in nicely and convey a positive, consistent message to your readers. 

A clean, somewhat more minimalist design will help visitors to read the information that’s on there rather than being distracted by a cluttered design. But again, you don’t want to go too far down the minimalist route, so finding a balance is crucial if you’re redesigning your site or are looking to launch one soon.

Give your readers the information they need to know without having them focus on a cluttered or boring design. You should still look to include content such as:

• What it is you offer
• How much experience you have and other USPs (unique selling points)
• How they can get in touch with you

5. Your site takes too long to load 

Although this isn’t the sole reason why people are leaving your website, it’s still an important factor when it comes to retaining site visitors. You should look to run website tests every month or so in order to keep on top of how fast the site is loading. If it’s slow, then you should figure out why that’s happening as soon as possible so that the problem can be rectified. 

If the site loads painfully slowly, then visitors to your website won’t want to wait around for your site to load. Instead, they’ll close it down and click on a competitor’s site instead, as it’ll probably load much faster. This is especially common when it comes to mobile sites as people are looking for convenience. 

Optimise your website as much as you can in order to help improve the general loading speed. Your website visitors, conversions and leads will improve as your site speed does, but it might take a while for significant progress to be made, so keep an eye on the numbers but don’t pay too much attention to it.