6 Reasons People Are Leaving Your Website
Friends, I don’t think I need to tell you the importance of website presence when you’re a business owner right? We’re well passed that right?
Ok - phew.
So now that you have a website that hopefully you’ve been tracking, monitoring and measuring success through a simple stat add-on or the beast, Google Analytics (recommended!!!), you should now have a good idea about how people are using your website.
Once your site has been live for any significant amount of time, you should be checking in on these stats so you know more about what content is most viewed, what parts are users clicking on and how many people are landing on your site and then closing the tab, or rather “bouncing,” which is both the technical term and the more hip one if you ask me.
Bounce rates give you insight into how many people make it to one of your landing pages and then bounce after viewing just that one page.
Obviously this isn’t ideal. We want people to stick around. We want them to dig further into our site, find the information they want and need as quickly as possible, and then follow up with us.
If your bounce rate is high, I’ve got a few ideas why. I see these things time and time again, and yes - they all matter!
Poor imagery choices
If you have selfies as your website banners and pixelated, low quality photos throughout your website, then how can we blame someone for making a judgement about your brand and deciding you’re not for them?
I’m not trying to be mean! I promise - I’m a nice person. But if you don’t take your business seriously enough to at least use high res photos, how can anyone else? Use good imagery.
Imagery is the captivator. It’s what will draw people in and intrigue them. Your text and content is the informational part that they’ll be interested in once you’ve captured their attention.
Load time is too slow
Your biggest asset is your time. Everyone is busy doing this and that, and with the revolution of the interwebs, we all expect everything, like, yesterday. I’m guilty of it too.
Perhaps it’s annoying for us to be caught up in the fast-paced world we live in, but it’s also a sad reality that we have to accept. So if your load time is so super slow and people don’t want to stick around and wait, don’t blame them.
Hubspot states that the ideal load time of a webpage is 1.5 seconds. That means you have 1.5 seconds to capture someone’s attention before they move on. Ah! Pressure’s on.
To help combat slow loading times, make sure all of your images are compressed and saved for website content. This means you can save your photos at 72-150dpi, not the print-worthy 300dpi that photographers might give you your files in.
You can also make sure you’ve built your website with a reputable theme/template or designer/developer who knows how to optimize these things. Code can play a big role in webpage load times!
Want to test out your site? Check out Google’s PageSpeed resource.
Music or videos on autoplay
If you have music clips or video clips that autoplay on your website, you may want to look into a solution that allows the user to decide what they want to hear.
We’ve already seen this happening with Facebook and Instagram feeds. When you’re scrolling you can see the videos playing, but YOU have to be in control as to whether you turn the sound on.
It can be alarming or disruptive to user experience if you just assume your user wants your content auto-playing in their earphones, or more embarrassingly, out of their computer at work.
There’s too much happening
Overloading is overwhelming.
When there are so many different graphics, colours, fonts or menu links to sift through on a page, users aren’t going to want to stick around to dig.
It’s so important to streamline your content. Get to the point and do it clearly and effectively instead of in longgggggggg blocks of text.
Your content should be easy to find and look cohesive to the rest of your brand and website. Ultimately we want to share less, but with more impact, than share EVERY little detail and risk people bouncing off your site because they can’t find what they need in…1.5 seconds?
Streamline your text. Break it up with impactful and necessary imagery. Use headings to pull out important info. Use buttons to guide users through the rest of the site.
There’s not enough happening
So counter to too much happening on your site, some pages don’t have enough. If you have a bunch of pages up with “Coming soon!” labels, the site feels very incomplete and the user most likely won’t remember to come back when they think you might have populated the info.
Unpublish incomplete pages until they’re ready to launch.
It may also be the case that you’re just simply not giving enough information. People love connection and humanity in a brand. We want to know who you are as well as what you do. People also tend to love when your information is transparent.
If you have price list, or if you can provide a rough guideline for pricing (perhaps writing something like “starting at”) - this helps incredibly with user experience. The more information you can give in the most compact way, the better!
You want to give people enough information that they want to remain engaged on your page or better yet, move on to the next step: connecting with you.
Broken URLs
Check out airbnb's cute and creative 404 error page
We’ve all seen ‘em: 404 errors happen! But try and stay on top of them by setting up redirects. If this is too complicated for you or you simply can’t manage how many URL changes are out there in the interwebs, then at least put time and effort into creating an effective 404 error page.
This way, if someone does stumble upon a broken link of yours, they’ll be given some info to get them to a good starting point.
Need some inspiration? I'm loving on this Creative Bloq post about creative 404 pages.
So there you have it. These are 6 of the most common reasons I have encountered for high bounce rates.
People have a lot going on in their own lives. There’s so much stimulation in the world these days and so if we can make just one little, tiny part of their day more efficient and effective, then let’s try!
The bottom line is that we just want to make it easy for people to get from point A to Z on our webpages as quickly and simply as possible.
If you tackle any of these strategies on your own website and notice a difference in your bounce rate, I’d love to hear about it. Drop a comment below!
Time to bounce. :)
