20 May Five Reasons Why Visitors Don’t Stay On Your Site
Many people are obsessed with how many views their website is getting and how many people are reading their content. Really though, this is a statistic that has no real bearing on anything other than your success with SEO. And your success with SEO does not guarantee success with your website – not by a long shot.
If you are thinking about success in terms of whether people actually like your site, and whether or not it’s likely to make any money, then what you really need to look at is how long people are staying on your page for which tells you whether or not they are likely to click ads, and which tells you whether or not you are likely to get any repeat visitors or free links.
This is what is really important for long term website success then, and what it boils down to is the design of your site largely, but also a number of other factors. Here we will look at some things that might be putting people off of reading your page.
Looking Dated
If your website looks dated and as though it hasn’t been updated in a long time, then of course people aren’t going to stay as they’ll instantly assume that the information is no longer valid and that any product or services you might be selling are no longer available. Of course this is not what you want, and it’s highly important your site looks like it was made recently and that it was updated recently too.
Incorrect Spelling
Incorrect spelling communicates one thing to someone looking at your site – and that’s that the page was probably written by a 13 year old. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but it does lose you a lot of traffic as people would rather get the official word from someone who sounds like they’ve got some experience and are professional writers. A couple of typos will always slip through the net, but make sure you have some form of spell check when writing your content.
Slow Loading Times
If your site takes ages to load then a lot of people won’t bother. Likewise if your site is just far too heavy in the sense that it slows down scrolling and things, then no one is going to want to stay on your page.
Ugly Colors
You’d be surprised at what an impact color choices can have on how we perceive a website. If the colors are loud and angry then this almost feels like an assault on our senses and as a result we tend to want to leave quickly. If however they are more gentle and calming then we are going to want to stay and look around because it will feel like an ‘oasis’.
Too Many Ads
Google actually did us a favor with their new fold algorithm. The point is that people weren’t staying on pages with a lot of adverts on them anyway, so we are wise to remove them. If the first thing people see on your page is ads, and they don’t know where to find the actual content, then of course they’re going to leave.
Kera Saunders is a web designer and internet marketer. Kera has come to really like and recommend KISSmetrics to help webmasters understand website analytics and customer behavior.
