Is your website letting you down? Is it failing to produce the traffic or leads that you hoped for? Are your bounce rates through the roof?
Web marketing is incredibly complex and your site may be suffering from any number of things that can hurt its performance. However, there are 4 major reasons why people leave a site as quickly as they arrive.
Here they are, and how to avoid them.
1. Your Site is Too Slow
source:currentcontent.ie
This is easily one of the most common reasons that people abandon a site. Their interest is earned, but then lost when the page takes too long to load.
Your site may be too slow because of:
Too much coding
Too many plugins in the back end
Images that have not been compressed for web use
If you have audited the things above and your site is still too slow, odds are good you’re struggling with bad website hosting.
Consider upgrading to a hosting provider like HostPapa to speed up your site. Free-or-cheap sites are known to throttle your site’s speeds when you start to use a certain level of bandwidth, which means you’ve reached a certain level of traffic.
In essence, you’re getting too much traffic for them to handle.
2. Your User Experience is Broken
We could fill hundreds of blogs with things that can break a user’s experience, but they all give you the same result: abandonment.
In fact,the data shows that a stronger UX has the potential to raise your site’s conversion rates by as much as 400%.
If you can find out exactly what is tripping up your users, you can fix the problem and expect a spike in your traffic and conversions.
3. You Have No Call-to-Action or Next Step
source:currentcontent.ie
Maybe your visitors are leaving because you haven’t given them anything to do next. Or you made it unclear what they should do.
This is somewhat connected to your user experience. Once a user has read your blog post or product page, they should be enticed to do something else. That something could be:
View another page (related product or blog)
Make a purchase
Get a quote
Book an appointment
Subscribe to your blog, mailing list or newsletter
Any one of these goals is great and counts as a conversion. However, each page should only push traffic to one of these things. Having 12 different buttons to click is as bad as having zero.
4. Bad Sales Copy
source:infographicdesignteam.com
Copywriting can sometimes be where budget-strapped companies draw the line. They assume they can write the page themselves and don’t want to pay a professional to do it.
Bad copywriting can absolutely murder your site’s performance, and can take many forms. Maybe your leads and headings are flat and boring. Or maybe you have large intimidating blocks of text that a lot of users find off-putting.
Or maybe your microcopy is the problem. Believe it or not, the single word you put on a button (Subscribe vs. Submit, for example) can make a massive difference.
Again, these are just a few of the problems that can hurt any website, in any sector. Start by looking at your site’s speed, user experience, and sales copy. If you can’t find the problem, you should likely bring in a professional.
