😴 Why do visitors leave your website?

How many times have you opened a website and clicked the browser's "back" button almost the same second? Do potential customers do that on your website? If this is happening in your digital shop window and your conversion rates are falling, it is time to act and find out why visitors do not like your site.

Attracting traffic and turning visits into sales is essential. We have put together this short list of possible reasons so you can invest in improvements!

1. The site is too slow 😴

How fast a website loads is essential online. No visitor wants to wait long for a page to finish "loading". In fact, you can even put a number on it: two seconds. That is the average time a user will wait for a site to load. Yes, it is very little, but just one extra second lowers the conversion rate by 7% on average. For Amazon, for example, one extra second of waiting costs the company €1.6 billion.

2. It has too many pop-ups 😡

Of course pop-ups are great for turning clicks into leads or sales, and you should not remove them all, but use them wisely. If you do not, your potential customers will quickly head to a competitor's site.

There are several ways to use pop-ups without hurting your website's SEO. To start with, you can draw readers in with content before showing them a pop-up, give them a simple way to close the box, and hide pop-ups from people who have already seen them.

3. It is not mobile-friendly 💨

The number of people who visit websites on phones or tablets keeps growing and has already far overtaken visits from computers. So it is time to adapt your website to this not-so-recent change.

To make sure users have no trouble using the mobile version of your website, check that they do not need to zoom in to see the content properly. Menus and buttons should be easy to reach and not too close together.

Very important: Google will start excluding sites that are not responsive, and its indexing will put mobile versions first. In other words, for searches made on a smartphone or tablet, Google will rank mobile versions ahead of desktop versions.

4. Videos, sounds or music that start on their own🎤

Yes, we all like listening to music, but there is a time and a place for everything. How many times have you opened a website and loud music suddenly started playing? In a public place, this is very intrusive.

Now picture something even worse: having several tabs open at once and not knowing which one the sound is coming from. The first reaction is to close every open tab in the browser straight away. Exactly: you have just lost a potential customer.

If your website has this feature, consider adding a button that lets visitors start the video or music themselves instead of using autoplay.

5. The design is more attractive than functional 🤹‍♂️

The main focus of any website should always be to present content in an attractive way. At the same time, visitors should be able to use the site intuitively, without being too distracted by GIFs or animations.

Attractive but hard-to-use sites may bring in visitors, but once they realise nothing works, they leave.

So web design should follow some basic rules, among others:

• Follow the conventions visitors are already familiar with; • Keep the design consistent across all pages; • Pay attention to the fonts, colour, white space and layout you use.

Also think about adding an arrow so visitors can go back to the top, and the all-important search option.