Main Reasons for Website Leaves

The trend of having a website is a great thing. It allows you to easily raise awareness of your business and communicate with your soon-to-be customers. Or does it really? If your website is not on par with their expectations, they might never get to see most of the content that’s on it. Here are a few tips on what to avoid in order to keep them on your website:

Outdated design

If your web design was created in 2000, it’s probably time to change it. It’s no longer enough to simply have a website - nowadays, it needs to be encouraging and intuitive to navigate. You want the customer to see what you’re doing, what you’re selling, how to get it and for what price within seconds of visiting the website.

Too much gated content

It’s perfectly fine to require a visitor to register in order to see some content, but doing so in a way that restricts basic information is irritating and will likely cause them to leave and try another website. Also, make the registration as brief as possible - email and password are enough. Pretty please.

Your site loads slowly

Loading times are important. How many times did you close a website simply because it did not load quickly enough? According to research, many people are not very eager to wait. 47% of them expect the site to load in under 2 seconds 40% leave if it takes more than 3 seconds (source: Kissmetrics) Try to optimise your website so you’re not missing out on valuable customers.

Overwhelming ads

People don’t usually enjoy ads, but they became used to them being present in certain amounts. Having one or two banners on the sides of the screen is not going to kill people’s experience. However, going overboard with the amount of pop-ups or sliders is not going to reflect well on your visitors’ opinions, and therefore will discourage them from further browsing.

Autoplays

It’s fine to include videos or audio on your website, but any sort of autoplay is generally a bad idea - especially if the visitor cannot easily disable it. Actually, you know what - scratch that. It's never a good idea. Instead of looking for the “stop” or “mute” button, most of them are simply going to close the tab and won’t open it again. Autoplays accomplish nothing that can't be done by other means.

Lack of proper call to action

So a visitor arrives at your landing page and reads its content. He decides he’s interested in your product and would like to give it a try, or perhaps even purchase it. That’s great, but it won’t help much, unless you give him a simple and straight-forward way to move to the next step. If your call to action button is a small, simple line of text located somewhere in the corner (or, even worse, does not exist at all on the landing page), chances are the potential customer won’t notice and will simply close the page.

No optimisation for mobile

Mobile internet traffic has been on the rise for quite some time now. Since Google updated its algorithms, websites that are not optimised for mobile lose quite a lot in organic search rankings. Moreover, 30% of mobile customers decide not to go through with a transaction if the site is not optimised for them.