Six Reasons People Leave a Website

It takes a lot of time, hard work and money to bring visitors to your website. You have to run a powerful marketing campaign. But, all your efforts can go to waste if people leave your website shortly after landing on it.

A high bounce rate means just one thing – your website is not good enough to engage its visitors; it fails to deliver on their expectations. Following are the six reasons why it happens.

Problem With Loading

Inaccessibility is the first major reason why people leave your website. It can happen due to an array of factors.

• Your site takes too much time to load. No one likes to wait, not at least on Internet, where they have endless alternatives available.
• Browser incompatibility is another issue. If your site loads well on Google Chrome, but fails to load on Internet Explorer or other browsers, you will lose a vast majority of your target visitors.

Poor First Impression

First impression counts. Your website can leave a very bad first impression due to the following reasons.

• As soon as your website loads, a few pop-up windows open simultaneously. Trust me, it terrifies visitors.
• Auto sound and auto running videos drive people nuts.
• Instant demand for registration is another culprit. Why so hurry?
• Rubbish fonts and horrible color combination of background and texts result in poor readability.
• Unprofessional design turns your visitors off.
• Excessive and unnecessary use of flash content bores them.

Poor Content

Content is king. If your site loads fast and the first impression is also awesome, but if the content is poor, your visitors won’t stay.

• There are literally no excuses for too many spelling mistakes, typos and obvious grammatical errors.
• The content is filled with ‘fluff’ rather than ‘substance’.
• The content is targeted more to attract search engine spiders and lacks human touch.
• Your content is outdated. If the last post is from January 2011, people won’t hang around for long.

Frustrating Navigation

A badly-designed, woeful navigation provides a frustrating experience to the visitors.

• If people cannot find the information they are looking for easily and quickly, they won’t waste their time on your website.
• When clicking on a link opens a page in a new window, it confuses and annoys the visitors.

Prioritization Of Ads Over Content

This is a big turn off. Advertisements are important, but if they are annoying your visitors, they will take no time to leave your website.

• Pop-up ads are the worst culprits.
• The content is divided in several segments and there are too many ads placed between them.
• Your visitors click a link and reach a page with a full page advertisement, which they can either view or click on another link to proceed to the actual content. So nice of you that you provided this option. But, this speed breaker results in huge bounce rate.
• Many websites try to cheat visitors by making the ad links look like the normal navigation links. When users click on such links and land on different sites (when they are least expecting it), they feel cheated.

No Security Assurances

If none of the above factors hold true for your website and the bounce rate is still high, it is most probably because your site fails to win visitors’ trust.

• You are expecting people to make purchases from your website, but your site displays no security badges, such as an SSL certificate.
• The products on your site look promising, but product reviews and customer testimonials are missing from your site.
• You are asking your visitors to fill an unnecessarily very long form. People find it frustrating when they are asked to provide more information than is required. It also makes your site look suspicious.

Overall, if you are facing the problem of high bounce rate on your website, you can fix it easily by working on the above factors.