Do something about the rate visitors leave your site
These days the majority of visitors will leave your website within 10-12 seconds, it’s critical for us to make sure that we’re not doing anything that would encourage this kind of bad behavior. Often times it may be things beyond our control. Other times, there are definite no-no’s that spring up that cause your hard-earned visitors to flee.
Toward that goal let’s examine 5 reasons this happens and what steps to alleviate it.
5 Reasons visitors may leave within seconds of arriving
- Your content isn’t all that – Old, stale boring content is a guaranteed way to send them packing. You need to update your site with fresh content that speaks to your visitor’s interests and needs every now and then. Moreover, Google will most likely pay a lot more attention to you if that’s the way it is.
- Your site loads slowly – Website speed is a definite buzz-kill. Studies show that if your page isn’t loaded within 3 seconds they are gone. Keep this in mind when you decide to put 27 large format pictures of your summer vacation on your home page.
- Don’t use autoplay – We’re all for the use of videos and audios on your site, but when this media starts in on arrival, it will likely cause a lost visitor. The exception of course is a video salespage, but for all other pages, let them click it. You never know; they may be sitting in church when your intro music chimes in.
- Don’t use gateway pages – Unless you’re already a top dog, or people are just dying to see what you’ve got behind the curtain, this is almost always a fail.
- Don’t kill them with ads – Hopefully most of us have gotten over this one by now, but the temptation to put one more ad in front of your audience needs to be resisted and saved for the right time, right place. Use some discretion, and be a bit wiser than the next guy. After all, we’ve likely seen this before.
Don’t give people yet more reasons to bail out on you: find ways to make them hang around.