Have you ever been to a website that was so bad that you wanted to leave it immediately? <<< You know the website I’m talking about, the one that looks like it came out of 1995—aka. it’s ugly and probably slow and hard to navigate.
Now no matter how strategically designed your website is—you’re always going to have a percentage of your website visitors who bounce off faster than you can sing “bye-bye-bye’. BUT that being said if you have a lot of people leaving your website that’s not good.
How to Reduce Your Website Bounce Rate
What Does Strategic Website Design Mean?
Having a large percentage of your website visitors leave your website quickly will not only negatively impact your SEO but it’ll be bad for your business.
That’s why in this blog post I’m going to break down 10 reasons why someone will leave your website—so that you can make changes on your website to minimize how many people leave your website.
Your website loads slower than molasses
You’ve got about 4 seconds (maybe) for your website to load before you risk someone leaving your website. We live in an “I ain’t got time for that” era where people expect your website to load instantly or they’ll leave it’s as simple as that.
There are a lot of factors that can make your website load slow but the most likely culprit is too large of image file sizes. You need to compress the file size of all your website imagery before you upload it.
I use TinyPNG to compress all of my website imagery.
Your website is ugly and/or outdated-looking
94% of people leave a website simple because they don’t like the design. <<< Shocking right?!?! That means basically everyone who lands on your website is going to leave if your website is ugly.
I’ve seen one too many Instagram posts that say something like, “You need a strategic website, not a pretty one”—BUT the data doesn’t back up this kind of statement.
Your website HAS to look nice or people will leave it. AND I don’t know about you but that sounds like strategic website design to me *shrug*
Your website is confusing to navigate
If your website is confusing to navigate, you may be losing potential ideal client leads. Confusion is the enemy of conversion. If you confuse your website visitors they will leave.
Not only does the main navigation in the header of your website need to be easy to use with no more than 5-7 links. BUT all of your website pages need to be easy to scroll thru.
Why Your Website Needs to Be Skimmable
Your website isn’t optimized for mobile
On average about 50% percent of your website visitors are going to be browsing with their phone. So if your website isn’t optimized for mobile, it’s likely going to make 50% of your website visitors want to leave your website.
You’ve got lots of broken page links
Broken website links are annoying, which can obviously make someone want to leave your website. <<< Now the caveat to this is no matter how diligent you are about keeping track of old links and creating 401 redirects for them—there are still going to be times when someone mistypes one of your links or you accidentally forget to redirect an old page.
There are two different ways to combat this. The first is to make sure your 404 error page is optimized to try and keep people on your website.
The second is to periodically check your website with a broken link checker to see if you’ve missed any old links that need redirecting.
You’ve got too many annoying pop-ups
Website pop-ups. We love to hate them but they have a decent conversion rate so avoiding them entirely isn’t the right answer. The key to having effective non-annoying pop-ups is to make sure you don’t have to many or have them pop up too quickly. You want to give someone time to digest a bit of your best content before you ask them to do whatever the pop-ups ask them to do.
You can delay the timing of your pop-ups either by the time someone is on one of your website pages or by how far someone has scrolled down one of your website pages. <<< We can have a debate about which is better for your website’s user experience—BUT I personally think that timing pop-ups based on how far someone has scrolled is better.
Your website has hard-to-read fonts
Your website needs to be easy to read or you’ll likely have people leave your website. And part of making it easy to read is using fonts on your website that are easy to read.
Avoiding hard-to-read script fonts for more than one sentence of text and using no more than 2-3 fonts total will make your website easier to read. You can use different font weights for each of your fonts to help.
How to Choose Brand Fonts for Your Website
Your contact information is hard to find
44% of people will leave a website if the contact information is hard to find. You need to make sure your contact page is easy to find on your website. You need to link your contact page in the footer and main navigation of your website. You can also list any consider including your contact information directly in the footer without having to click on your contact page to get to that information.
Your content is boring and/or outdated and/or unhelpful and/or irrelevant
You need to create evergreen content for your website—BUT that content needs to be relevant to the problems your ideal client is facing. It also needs to have up-to-date information.
What is Evergreen Content Marketing?
Why You Need a Blog on Your Website
You don’t have any call to actions on your website
If your website is getting visitors but you’re not seeing conversions it’s probably because you don’t have call to actions on your website. And you aren’t alone—70% of websites don’t have call to actions *cringe*
It sounds counterintuitive but people want to be told what to do on our website. And the way you guide them through your website is by having call to actions on every single page of your website.
Why Your Website Isn’t Converting
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