why people leave a website

10 Reasons Why People Leave a Website

Running a successful website requires you to pay attention to plenty of metrics. It’s the only way to ensure that everything is running well and that the website ranks high. You need to stay vigilant and perform regular audits to prevent serious issues from developing, which might be the reasons why people leave a website soon after they enter it.

For example, noticing challenges such as high bounce rates can indicate an issue with the website’s design, functionality, and mobile compatibility. Luckily discovering what’s causing the problem is much easier with the tools that are available today. If you’ve noticed that people are leaving your website, there are plenty of reasons behind this. Keep reading to find out what are the ten most likely causes of this.

1. The design is not intuitive

Design plays a vital role in the performance of every website. Following the latest trends will help you create a smooth customer journey. Design is equally important whether we’re talking about a news site, an eCommerce platform, or a popular blog.
However, discovering whether the design is making people leave your website requires deploying analytics on your website.

Additionally, you’ll need to use two different types of analytics. One is behavioral analytics which analyses your visitors’ on-page activity. The other one presents overall statistics of your website, such as ranking, traffic numbers, and bounce rates.

You can learn more about HotJar vs Google Analytics to understand the differences between these tools better.

With these at hand, you’ll be able to identify the problematic pages of your website as well as the design elements that are not performing as intended.

Validate your concepts for performance during the design stage with AI-generated attention analytics

2. The site is loading slowly

Loading time is one of the crucial ranking elements. It impacts whether a user stays on your website or decides to move on to another. Half of your visitors expect your website to load within three seconds.

That’s why it’s crucial to optimize your website’s loading time. Luckily, checking loading time is easy with PageSpeed Insights. Simply enter your URL and let Google’s tool analyze the loading time. It checks for both the desktop and mobile versions of your website.

What’s more, it’ll identify all the elements that are slowing down your website. You’ll immediately know what optimization steps you should take. Moreover, you can significantly improve your site speed by going headless with the help of a headless cms platform

3. There are too many ads


Millions of websites rely on website ad revenue. However, that doesn’t mean that the ads should interfere with the user’s experience. If you’re someone who’s running ads, find ways to include them in your content, so they don’t pop up everywhere the user goes.

The most common location that’s not intrusive is the header of your website. That way, the users see the ad as soon as they land on the webpage, but they can continue browsing the page without feeling overwhelmed.

Remember that your visitors are there for the content of your website. Make sure that it’s easily accessible and not cluttered with unnecessary elements. Otherwise, people will leave your website and search for a better alternative with fewer ads.

why people leave a website

4. Overwhelming number of pop-ups


Pop-ups can be very irritating elements on a website. They interfere with the visitors’ experience of the platform. There’s no need to serve them a pop-up window to register or join a newsletter. It’s much better to make those elements visible on your website at all times.

If you’re uncertain whether the visitors are leaving because of the pop-ups, use analytics to monitor pages that serve them. From the moment you remove them, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by lower bounce rates. Plus, search engines aren’t fond of them as well.

5. Poor performance on mobile

Don’t forget that over 50% of web traffic is coming from mobile devices. The last thing you want to have is a website that doesn’t perform well on smartphones and tablets. That’s especially important for ecommerce websites where people want to finish their purchase on mobile.

You’ll not only experience high bounce rates but also lose valuable conversions and sales figures.

Luckily, most modern platforms such as Shopify, WordPress and Joomla come equipped with mobile support. It’s up to you to test all the pages and ensure that everything’s performing optimally.

why people leave a website

6. Complicated checkout process

Your customer’s journey ends with the checkout process. Your goal is to simplify this process as much as possible. You should focus on following these rules to reduce cart abandonment rates.

  • Short checkout — The checkout process should take two steps from the moment the user is on the cart page. One should be for the address details and purchase confirmation, whereas the second should lead to a payment processor. Creating a long checkout process might turn away the customer, resulting in them leaving your site.
  • No registration requirement — If possible, don’t require user registration. You can get all the essential information about your customers from the ordering page. Demanding registration puts the customer through more steps.
  • No additional costs — Make sure that the users see total costs in the cart. Adding hidden fees on the checkout page will negatively affect the cart abandonment rates.

These rules will help you reduce customers from having second thoughts when they’re going through the checkout.

7. Poor content quality

An effective SEO strategy brings many ways to increase your sales. However, the content on your webpage is not there only for the keywords and links. You have to create a plan that’ll provide actual value to your visitors. In fact, 87% of shoppers go through some sort of research before making an online purchase.

Your content needs to be informative, professional and engaging. That’s the best way to keep a visitor on your website and to increase pageviews. These metrics play an important role in lowering bounce rates and improving your website’s ranking.

Evaluate analytics and monitor what works well and what doesn’t.

For example, avoid writing content that’s not SEO friendly. Create structured articles that feature short paragraphs, include relevant keywords but most importantly, that offer valuable information on a particular topic.

Another point to keep in mind is flawless grammar. You want to be perceived as a professional, and using abbreviations, bad grammar and excessive exclamation marks throughout the content won’t lead to such results.

Last but not least, use imagery to keep the reader’s attention. People don’t want to see walls of text and using images is a great way to break the text apart.

8. Auto-play videos


Featuring videos on your website is a great way to offer a variety of options to your visitors. However, the auto-play that’s been popular with social media doesn’t work with websites. If the user wanted to watch a video, they would visit a platform such as YouTube.

They’re on your site to read, explore and watch a video if they want.

Plus, adding auto-play videos slows down the page loading speed, which negatively affects user satisfaction.

9. You’re missing a call to action

Creating a compelling journey that converts requires helping the user navigate your website. The best way to achieve that goal is by adding clear calls to action. They’ll instruct the visitor on what they should do and cause them to take action.

Otherwise, users will simply roam your website, uncertain of what they ought to do. Such scenarios might lead to them leaving your website.

If you’re experiencing poor conversions and high bounce rates, go over landing pages on your website. Ensure that all the calls to action are visible. Obtain data with user behavior tracking to easily detect what is causing the issue on your landing page.

why people leave a website

10. Poor security

If you notice that your traffic has been growing and your website performs excellent, ensure it remains secure. High-traffic websites are appealing targets as hackers are constantly working on breaching websites for their benefit.

They don’t always want just to bring down your website and call it a day. Injection with malicious code that slows down a website is a standard procedure to undermine competition.

Otherwise, they might hack your website to add backlinks to their website and boost their ranking.

You don’t want anyone to access your website because all these actions in the background will heavily impact its loading speed. Therefore, deploy security software to keep your website safe and run regular audits to ensure you’re safe.

Besides, security software and SSL certificates should be on the checkout page that assures customers that the website is safe, and their information will remain safe. If the site is eCommerce, then you have an ideal SSL certificate type that a site owner can install for the website. A cheap wildcard SSL certificate can secure the main domain and first level of subdomains easily with strong encryption.

Concluding thoughts

Keeping your bounce rates low can only benefit your website’s performance. If you notice that an increasing number of your customers are not anymore present, start looking for the reason why people leave your website.

Identifying the underlying issue might take some time, but once you figure out the root of the problem, you’ll immediately know what steps to take. Experiment.

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