5 Reasons Why People Are Leaving Your Website

When you first designed your website, we’re sure you imagined loads of traffic entering your site, but maybe that has yet to happen. You might be wondering what it is about your website that’s causing users to leave before they see what you have to offer. Is it your web design? Maybe your content isn’t as compelling as it could be? Or perhaps, there’s more than one reason.
Creating a custom website that is unique to your practice and targets your audience is the key to attracting more users.

To help you identify what could be causing this lull in web traffic, we’ve compiled a list of the most common website mistakes business owners make that can cause you to lose prospective customers.

1. Poor web design

When developing your website, sometimes it can be difficult to create a balance between design and functionality. You have to be able to construct a site that not only works well, but also looks GOOD. When a website is designed well, it helps you build trust and credibility with your audience.

In a way, your site is like your portfolio. It’s the first impression that visitors have of your practice and what they use to get to know your team better. It showcases your products, services, and the quality of your brand.

If a website is too boring, people will quickly become disinterested. But if it’s too busy, visitors may feel anxious and overwhelmed, not knowing where to focus their attention. This can cause web users to exit your site, leaving you unable to convert them into a patient or client. So, how can you find the perfect blend of incorporating beauty on your site with effortless user experience?

How to Enhance Your Website Design

When content goes live on your website, you need to consider how it’s being presented to your audience. Are there graphics to look at or is it all huge blocks of text? What is it that is keeping the attention of your visitors?
There are many ways to design a website, but here are some of the most important components you can use to give your website a new look:

• Theme – Updating your theme will give your website the fresh look that it may need to attract new patients or clients. Your theme should be consistent and relevant to your audience. For example, if your website is targeting optometrists, are you going to have a wacky website with bright colors and other elements that would be better suited for a less mature audience? Of course not! You would be targeting an audience of professionals, so your site should be tasteful and feature appropriate branding. Show consistency with your color scheme, logo, fonts, etc.
• Graphics – Give your site a personal touch by creating custom images or investing in a photoshoot for your business. Your potential clients want to know what you do and how you do it. Make them feel like they are forming a relationship with you by giving them insight into the daily activities around your office.
• Font – Use fonts that are easily legible for your readers. You don’t have to choose the classic Times New Roman or Arial, but also make sure you don’t choose a font that is unusual or hard for people to read. Pick a few fonts and stick to those on all of your web pages.

2. Slow loading speed

Let’s face it, we’re in an era of information overload. There is so much content being created every second that it’s impossible to keep up with everything. So, if your website is slow to load, it will be left in the dust with others that cannot keep up with the competition.

Your web page has about two seconds to load before you risk losing a possible patient or client.

There are quite a few reasons that your landing page may be loading slowly. Here are some common mistakes that cause slow loading speed:

• Unnecessarily large files
• Unoptimized images
• Excessive HTTP requests
• Javascript issues

If you’re having a problem with any of these on your website, there are available programs that will diagnose these issues. Google even has a free tool that will analyze your page speed and give you tips on how to decrease the loading time. 

3. Your website is not responsive

A responsive website resizes its content based on the device that content is being viewed on. Whether it’s being seen on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone, the website will expand or minimize to the appropriate size for viewers. 

It is imperative to have a mobile-responsive site in today’s society if you want to have any type of web presence. It should be flexible and have the ability to adapt to all screen types if you want to increase web traffic. 

According to Perficient Digital, 58% of website visits came from mobile devices in 2018. That number is expected to continue to see growth from here on out. If people cannot view your site on their phones, they most likely will click out of your website entirely. This can contribute to your bounce rate, which then, in turn, damages your Google ranking. 

You can design your site to be responsive yourself or you can have someone do the behind the scenes work for you to make sure there are no loose nuts and bolts. 

4. Your content is not optimized

Creating high-quality, optimized content for search engine optimization (SEO) may seem like a burdensome task, but we promise it’s not! If you don’t optimize your content, you won’t receive much organic traffic and thus stay at a lower ranking on search engine results pages. Here’s how you can fix that:

• Keywords – Using keywords in your content is one of the first rules in optimizing for SEO. Once you’ve researched your audience, choose keywords that are relevant to their search queries, and use those in your meta descriptions, title tags, and content.
• Links – Make yourself an authoritative figure in your industry by providing irrefutable sources that your audience trusts. If you’re citing from an outside source, it’s perfectly fine to link to that page. However, internal links may be just as important as external links. It helps users navigate to other pages on your website and get more traffic on each page. For instance, if you write a blog post about how to soothe anxious chiropractic patients on their first visit to your office and you have a separate web page about what patients can expect from their first appointment, link to that specific page in your blog post.
• Social Sharing – If you make your content shareable on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social sites, that can increase the organic traffic you get to your website. Users have the ability to share your content with their network of friends, which then creates more exposure for you and your business.

5. There are too many ads

Have you ever been on a site that has so many ads pop up that you can’t even navigate to another page without one showing up? Well, if that’s your site, imagine how your visitors feel. They are trying to browse your website, but are unable to do so if advertisements keep popping up.

The practice of including numerous ads on a website has started to become so standard that more and more users are employing ad blockers on the browsers. We understand that you may need to run a few, but how can you still run a reasonable amount of ads without turning away potential clients?

One way is to make sure that the ads you run aren’t blocking any content on the page. If your visitors can’t even see the content they are trying to read, they’ll exit the site. Another way is to avoid auto-play ads that people aren’t expecting to play in the middle of them browsing your site.

Put yourself in the client’s shoes. How many ads can you see on a site before it starts to bother you and pushes you to leave?

Google does not have specific guidelines to how many ads you can run on your page, but they do weigh the value of your content versus how many ads you have. If your content is not very strong or valuable AND you have a large number of ads running, it will lower your ranking.

Consider how your ads are affecting the viewing of your content and ranking to make an informed decision on how many to run on your site.

Fix it and flourish

So, we’ve gone through the top 5 reasons people may be leaving your site and how to fix them. Now it’s up to you to make those necessary changes. If you want to see your website and your business flourish, shaking things up could help. Updating your design, creating more custom content, or taking away a few ads may be just what you need to work your way up the results page ladder.