What Makes People Leave Your Website

My friends over at Kissmetrics have a great graphic explaining what makes people leave your website.

For your convenience, I’ve listed the 8 points that makes people leave your website along with a little of my own short commentary.

8 reasons people leave your website:

1. Bad Navigation
   Are you frustrating your visitors by making your navigation menu too complex, too confusing or just plain difficult to understand and use?
2. Too Many Ads
   This may not apply to you specifically. But if we reframe it with too many things down the side (sidebar) of your website – which happens a lot – it may apply then.
3. Bad Content Structure
   If you make your content too difficult to find then you simply lose people’s interest in they go elsewhere.
4. Obtrusive Use of Audio & Video
   Bottom line, don’t have any media start automatically when people open your website – no matter how important you think the message is.
5. Registration Requirement
   Hopefully you just not doing this – requiring people to register just to read your content – especially content they found in a search engine.
6. Boring Content, Boring Design
   If your site is dull, old or unprofessional you’re doing your self more of a disservice having your site than not have one. Same goes with content. Be fresh, engaging and useful.
7. Poor Legibility
   Bad choice of graphics and/or colors. I see this a lot. If people can’t read your content easily, why would they stay?
8. Lack of Frequency
   If your website doesn’t have fresh, new content than most people will view it as ‘dead.’ And people don’t stick around to read dead websites. They have too many other sites they can look at. Update and publish new content as often as you can. And your website doesn’t allow that, then have one designed that does.

Now, before we look at the infographic, take a few minutes and go through your website. Review what makes people leave your website and see if any of this is happening on your site. You may not know. Or you may be too close to your website and your content that you’re unsure.

So ask someone else to take a look. And if you find something, I would hope you’d get it fixed.

Here’s the infographic with a lovely list of what makes people leave your website – and some solutions:

(again, thanks to my friends at Kissmetrics for creating this infographic)