Top 9 Reasons Customers Leave Your Site (And Never Come Back) & How to Avoid It?

If you don’t pay required attention to design and other aspects of the web page or website that doesn’t provide the desired experience to the end users then expect losing your visitors. When a visitor leaves your website, it affects lead generation, which causes loss of revenue.

The ultimate aim of any website is to attract visitors and generate revenue from it. If the visitors don’t like what they see on your website, they will bounce it. More the bounce rate, more negatively your business gets impacted.

What is bounce rate?

The percentage of users that visits your website and bounces back without visiting any other pages or posts other than the entering page, is called the bounce rate.

Before you get upset about the bounce rate of your website, let’s get into what should be the right bounce rate. As per a report by RocketFuel, the bounce rate for the majority of websites ranges between 26% to 70%.

The report further defines the bounce rate grading system for a website.

·        70% or above: Bad

·        56-70%: Above normal bounce rate

·        41-55%: Average bounce rate

·        26-40%: Excellent bounce rate

·        25% or below: Unusually good

How bounce rate affects your business?

If the bounce rate of a web page or website is higher, it is an indication that the page or site isn’t relevant to visitors. When visitors leave a site without exploring, a judgement is passed to the search engines related to the quality of the website.

Google considers the bounce rate of a website as a factor in its search algorithm to rank it in search results. If a website has a high bounce rate, it might face lower search rankings, which will impact the value of an online business.

Reasons for the high bounce rate

1. Slow web pages

No visitor has ever said that he/she loves slow web pages.

Loading time of a web page plays a major role in page abandonment. As per a report by Kissmetrics, the majority of users will leave the site if it doesn’t load within 6 to 10 seconds.

If you are wondering what makes your web pages to load slow, then here is a list:

• Opting for cheap web hosting (You get what you pay for)

• Use of large-sized images

• Large number of images, distracting users from relevant content

• Use of fancy fonts and sliders

SEO leaders and webmasters have been focusing on accelerating site speed for a long time now. If the bounce rate of your site is high, then check the loading speed of site and web pages using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix. If the page speed is slow, then work on recommendations provided by these tools.

2. Poor Design and UX

Another mistake that website owners make is that they use text and graphics more than required. When you have too much text and too many graphics, the web page becomes cluttered and makes it difficult for users to find relevant information.

Poor website design doesn’t attract the users and decreases the click rate, even if the web page is loading faster.

3. Difficult navigation and usability

End users sometimes like the content on your web page and look to explore further. But they don’t find right navigation. For example, you don’t have a search option on your blog. Mostly, they expect navigation options or tools at the top of a web page. Difficulty in navigation can be another reason contributing to high bounce rate even if the page content is good and loads at a fairly good pace.

For better usability, make sure you have enough whitespace on a web page. You don’t have to include things on every inch of the site. Whitespace help in improving the readability and make users understand the motive of your site.

4. Not responsive/mobile friendly

Today, more users visit a website from mobile devices than on desktops. Several studies support this trend.

This suggests that your website should respond properly on mobile devices. Visit your site from a smartphone and check its performance. If it’s not working well, optimize it and make it responsive on mobile devices for better bounce and conversion rates.

5. Pop-ups

The aim of pop-ups on a site is to drive conversions, gain new sign-ups and increase subscriber base. However, if you don’t use pop-ups the right way, it can annoy the users.

You have to play well with the pop-ups, analyze the timing of its showing up, as well as its design and content.

6. Use of multimedia items

Use of audio and video helps in optimizing the conversion rates for landing pages. However, if you don’t follow a number of things, this can go negative.

Handle the auto-play of video and audio content carefully. Users should have control over pausing or playing the content. Also, keep the length of videos short.

Provide proper CTA (call-to-action) so that they can explore more web pages.

7. Use of misleading title tag and meta description

Sometimes, to rank higher in search results, website owners use all the keywords related to their industry in the title tags and meta description of a web page. That page might attract visitors, but what if they find the content completely irrelevant to what they were searching for?

This will directly lead them to bounce back to the place they came from. This mistake can sometimes happen unintentionally as well. What you need to do is to review the content and use the title tag and meta description accordingly.

8. Technical errors

If the bounce rate of a web page is extremely high, then you should check if that web page is working or not. Sometimes, the reason of bounce rate is that a page faces technical errors like page not found, data gets deleted or doesn’t load.

9. Browser compatibility issues

Your website should be compatible with the major web browsers, like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. Visit your site from these browsers to see how the web pages are behaving. If they are not working properly on any browser, then try fixing the issue at the earliest.

Conclusion

People are surfing the web to find the required information and positive experiences. To attract and engage a visitor to your site and make him explore further, you need to take care of the things mentioned above.

Craft your message in the right manner, make sure the web page loads faster and provides relevant information and last but not least, the site behaves in the uniform fashion across all devices.

How are you addressing the bounce rate issues for your website? Please let us know in the comments below.

 

Author Bio:

Vaibhav Shah is the CEO of Techuz, a top mobile app and web development company, Techuz InfoWeb. He is a technology maven, a visionary who likes to explore innovative technologies and has empowered 100+ businesses with sophisticated solutions