SEO

7 Reasons Why Visitors are Leaving Your Website

Last updated on May 8, 2018 by Lucy Benton 8 min read

Table of Contents

Introduction

Today, having a website is one of the greatest ways to earn money and tell the community about the product or service you’re working on.

A well-designed web page which is frequently updated and filled with a captivating newsfeed dramatically increases your chances of website success.

However, no matter how hard you work on your website, sometimes it doesn’t save you from making mistakes and driving potential visitors away.

Website owners often face reduced traffic and loss of interest.

This ultimately jeopardizes their ability to remain viable in a very competitive digital world.

For example, recent Internet stats suggest that there are 1.24 billion websites out there.

This means that even the smallest mistake in creating or updating your website can potentially drive visitors away.

If you feel like your visitors have lost their interest, or you’re just a newbie who wants to create a large community united by your website, here are 7 of the most common flaws that drive or may potentially drive visitors away from your website.

Things That Make Users Leave Your Website

1. A Hard-to-Browse Website

When it comes to browsing a website, any visitor would prefer an easy and understandable website infrastructure, which allows them to easily find the necessary information.

If your website has a difficult structure, a lot of subdivisions and redirections, it will instantly drive away your visitors, no matter how informative your content is.

An effective website structure involves 6 major steps!

Step One: Plan the Website’s Hierarchy

You must plan the hierarchy of your website.

When?

Even before actually creating and developing your website.

In other words, you need a well-planned structure before launching it.

There are several crucial things you must bear in mind when creating the structure:

It should be logical
The number of major categories should vary from two to seven
The number of subcategories should be balanced and equal for each category

Step Two: Create the Web Version

After you’ve worked on your website’s hierarchy, you can create its web version.

It shouldn’t be too difficult to browse.

If any corrections should be made, this would be a great opportunity to go for it.

Step Three: Website Navigation

The third step involves creating website navigation in HTML or CSS.

The coding should remain simple.

Remember that coding using HTML or CSS will allow you to create a flexible website navigation.

The navigation structure should follow a shallow depth pattern or flat pattern as opposed to a deep hierarchy pattern.

This means that webpages – divided into subcategories – shouldn’t be buried too deep on your website.

Step Four: Header Time

The important thing to do is to create a header that will allow you to redirect users to the main navigation pages.

This will ensure a greater flow of new visitors.

Step Five: Internal Link Structure

You should also think about your internal link structure.

Your internal links are closely connected with search engines.

They tell them what pages are more important or less interesting.

Ready for another aspect that’s driving your users way?

Keep reading!

2. Crowded Content

It seems that content can’t be too informative, but it can.

Website owners only want the best for their visitors when they post content.

Even so, it can be overflowing with too much information.

Unfortunately, this exacerbated need to insert all the info available makes the content excruciatingly hard to read or even browse through.

How can you make your content more readable?

The best ways to make your content readable all involve:

Using subheadings. This way, you’ll create compelling content and be able to help your website visitors browse through your web pages more easily
Using compelling sources from the web. To increase website visitors, your content should only be supported by credible sources
Creating bullet lists. Subdivide your information into several chunks that’ll allow each website visitor to better capture the idea of your content

Another mistake is to post content which is just too lengthy.

Not all of your website visitors have enough time to read a lengthy essay about how great your product or service is.

It’s better to post two different articles than to place all the information into one.

Ready for another reason why users are flying away from your website?

Dive into the next one!

3. Too Many Popups

It’s normal for website owners to attract advertisers to their sites and get more money from the content they’ve posted.

This allows them to effectively promote the website and get additional costs for website maintenance.

But having too many ads popping up on your website won’t allow your website visitors to properly read the content.

This means they won’t help you when it comes to attracting more people and therefore effectively monetizing your website.

You should find a way to make more money from your website and still make sure the site continues to be interesting for each visitor who happens to stumble upon your web page.

To increase website visitors and earn money from the traffic, you need to discuss all the terms of placing the ads on your website with the advertisers.

Think about their proposals carefully.

Plus:

Avoid falling prey to anything which can potentially harm your content!

4. Slow Website

No one wants to read a website which loads for too long.

Website visitors wanna get information quickly.

If your website is too slow, people are likely to leave your web page and go look for another website which is quicker than yours.

What can you do?

Surely, performing some kind of platform optimization and also increasing your website traffic will definitely work.

Some other ways to help your website load quicker include:

Using other formats for the images. If the size of the images you’ve posted is too big, consider replacing them with pictures of a different format (i.e. WebP or JPEG XR)
Clearing cached versions of the content
Using compression to decrease the number of bytes, allowing your web page to load faster

Another unforgivable flaw that’s making people escape from your site like a mouse running from a hungry feline?

Keep on reading!

5. Unoriginal Content

Plagiarism is the plague of the digital world.

It seems that everybody copies information from original sources.

It also seems like they can easily get away with it.

But trust me:

It’s not as harmless as it may look!

For website owners, stealing content from other web pages is the equivalent to death (of their website, of course.)

The proper re-usage of someone’s content is allowed, as long as your website contains the original source and the author’s name.

What to do?

Try to come up with your own ideas.

Sometimes, it seems that everything has already been invented.

But even if it is so, try to use the already existing idea while never forgetting to add some new features to it.

It will show your personal approach and creativity and will attract more visitors to your website.

Go for another flaw right now!

6. Outdated Content

Updating your website is very important.

You should update your content more often, given that it attracts more visitors, and it also helps search engines find your content faster.

No one wants to read outdated information, it being that it’s easy for most of us to actually get brand-new and super updated info.

Don’t lag behind!

If you see that the information on your website is too old, do some research to add some new features to the content you already have.

Your readers will be interested to trace the evolution of your content.

They’ll also be able to learn more about the issues you talk about on your website.

7. Using Outdated Tools

Search for new tools to help you better optimize your website and attract new visitors.

Outdated tools are slower and inefficient.

Why?

Because there are new tools coming up every single day!

Here are some basic tools that you need in order to keep your website fresh and attract more visitors:

HotJar: this tool helps you analyze how visitors use your website, identify weak spots, and work on them
WebsiteGrader: evaluate the efficiency of your website and identify weak spots by using this tool
Awriter: this tool will help you create original content for your website and attract more visitors
Alexa: this tool from the Amazon Company allows you to better manage your traffic, reach your visitors, and find out how busy your website is

These tools will be extremely helpful for your website and help you attract new visitors.