5 Reasons visitors leave your website

The following has been compiled with the help of 39 respondents who kindly gave us their time over the phone for a short survey.
Our main research task was to find out what made website visitors leave the website homepage without even clicking on a single link.  There have been extensive research done on this in the past, however, we wanted to delve further with a more up-to-date approach considering recent Internet usage trends, website design ‘best-practices’ and with the current Internet landscape in mind. We have also laid out some recommendations on how you can avoid these pitfalls

Reason 1 – Information overload
With the popularity of Search Engine Optimization, this is becoming more commonplace as website owners try to improve the keyword density of their home (and sub-pages) to rank better. This often leads to trade-offs in whats best for the user vs. search engines.  Key here is to lay out the information in a neat and structured format with relevant information binded together for ease-of-read (think colour-coding or boxed approach).

Reason 2 – Page load time
Your website has approximately 4-6 seconds to convince a new visitor to stay.  You want to make sure that this time is spent looking at the site content, not waiting for it to load. As a general rule of thumb: More content = More code = Longer page load time.
However, ‘content’ refers to text, images as well as rich content such as flash.  Trimming down on unnecessary images , graphics and video can significantly bring down load times.

Reason 3 -  ‘Above the fold’  information
This refers to the part of the website that first shows up without using the vertical scroll to navigate further down the page. This will primarily depend on the monitor size and resolution, therefore, a safe bet would be to assume a 15 or 17 inch. and 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600 resolution (most common currently).
Make sure the most important information (relevant to your business) is visible above the fold . Common elements include headline, your Unique Sales Proposition, intro text and contact details.

Reason 4 – Inconsistent design with service offering
Here is an interesting one: 19% of respondents told us that they would not bother going further than the home page if the design was not consistent with their idea of the ideal service provider. This highlights the importance of not just having a design that your target market can relate to, but also one that is consistent with your own business offering.

Reason 5 – Browser incompatibility issues
As browsers such as Firefox and Chrome become more popular, make sure your website displays correctly across the entire range of browsers from old to latest versions of each. Browsershots offers a free and useful feature which allows you to check your website’s appearance across all currently available browsers.

If you have any comments or would like to tell us about what website feature (or lack of) annoys you the most, we’d love to hear about it!