Episode 2

Have you ever gone to a party or event, took a look around and just decided this was not what you expected. So you left. Well the same thing can be happening with your website. Once people get to it they aren’t finding what they thought they were there to find. This is called bounce rate. It’s the percentage of visitors who come to your website, no matter if it’s your homepage, your blog, your sales page, landing page, whatever it may be and leave without engaging with any of your content on your website, they don’t fill out your opt-in form.

Ideally, you want people to come to your website and stay on your website. You want them to read your content, take a look at your services, your products, etc. the longer, the better. So here are 6 reasons why potential clients or customers are leaving your site and how you can fix it on your own. 

1. Slow Website

The first reason people leave a site is a slow website. I don’t know anyone who has said, “I’m so happy I came across this slow website. It’s taking five minutes to load. I’ll just sit here while the site loads.” Chances are you probably have not done that, and instead you left the website before it had a chance to load.

Why is your website loading slow? One of the main culprits is image size. I’m very guilty of this. When I started my first website back in 2007, I uploaded every single image. I was so proud of myself, but I didn’t realize that each image was like 10 million megabytes. My web developer at the time called me out on it! I had no idea I shouldn’t upload large files like that. So chances are your image files are the culprit of why your website’s a little slow, as well as using too many images. They bog down your site.

Another culprit is using pretty fonts. Some of these fonts are larger in size than others and can slow down your site. Even those slider images that you like on the home page, they can make the site run slow. So according to SEO guru Neil Patel, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in two seconds or less. Okay. Some might give a grace period of three seconds, but that’s it. They’re going to leave your site for a competitor’s site that loads faster and chances are they might even tell a friend in passing not to go to your site.

So how do you know if your site is running slow? I love this free tool called Pingdom. All you have to do is put in your domain, and it will give you a score based on your site’s loading speed. It also shows you file image size, so you can re-upload your photos and compress if your images are too big. There are also free tools to compress your photos without affecting the image itself, like tiny PNG and JPEG mini. 

2. Message Isn’t Clear

The second reason people may be leaving your website is that your message isn’t clear. So for example, let’s say you’re a photographer and you have a lot of attention-grabbing images on your website, but sometimes when you’re coming to a website like that, potential customers don’t really know what you do. If you don’t tell people what you do, it’s just a website of pretty images. You want to make sure that your message is clear, especially on what we call the top fold or top half of your website. So people don’t leave the site because they’re confused on what that website is all about. 

3. Website is Hard to Read

The third reason people may be leaving your website is that it’s hard to read. I know if I go to a website with my glasses on and I can’t read it, I am going to leave it. Yes, maybe I need to get a new prescription. Some fonts are so incredibly small or pretty scripts that people cannot read, so they leave the site. I love them, but some of them are very hard to read. I know myself, and I don’t have time to try to figure it all out and piece things together. And I’m sure a lot of people don’t either. So you want to make sure that you can step back from your website, and it’s still easy to read. Ask your friends, family, or coworkers, to take a look at your website to see if it’s readable. Also take note of the background and font colors. Yes they could look artistic, but they also may be very hard to read, especially on mobile. So you want to make sure again, that your site is readable, otherwise people will leave. 

4. You’re Sending the Wrong Traffic to Your Site

Another reason why people are leaving is because you’re sending the wrong traffic to your site. People get aggravated when they click and it’s not what they expected to see, especially on something in search results. For example, if I’m searching for a black skirt, I want to see a black skirt. I don’t want to see a red skirt because I’m looking for a black skirt. 

You can avoid this by putting on your website, “grab this similar item,” or “you might like this item as an alternative.” It’s still, maybe along the same lines of what they were looking for, but it will keep the visitor on the page more. So it’s sending the traffic to the site, and you just want to make sure that it’s crystal clear what you’re sending people there for. 

5. Spelling and Grammar Mistakes

If spelling and grammar is just not your thing, you want to find someone or an online proofreading tool that will help you. I won several spelling bees in elementary school, but that does not make me an expert speller by any means. In fact, I’m starting to wonder how I won those spelling bees lately. So I personally rely on a proofreading tool like Grammarly that will help me with my pages and posts. I’m not a grammar expert. Maybe I was in sixth grade and I had a promising future, but I’m not quite sure if those skills have left my brain or not, but I need some help, especially when it comes to proof-reading posts. This happens often. Even when we think a post or page is perfect, there’s always someone who can point out some spelling mistakes. So an online tool like Grammarly or a proofreader can help you with your website and blog post content. 

I’m sure you might be thinking well, “Does this really even matter? Do people even care if something is spelled wrong on your website?”. A survey from Global Lingo found that 50% of people would not use a company that had obvious grammatical or spelling mistakes on its website or marketing materials. The truth is that I do see it quite a bit, and it does reduce someone’s credibility. It shows that they didn’t take the time, especially on a website to proofread it. I don’t know how you feel about it, but it could be a reason why people are leaving a site. 

6. Asking for Too Much Information

Have you ever come across a website where they’re asking for your information? I know I have, a lot! Obviously they’re collecting data and that’s great. I’m all about collecting data and analyzing it. But if they’re asking my height, weight, eye color etc., and I’m just buying groceries, it doesn’t have to do with what I’m buying. Chances are, you might leave because you don’t know why they’re asking for this much data. For example, if you make perfume and you want to know someone’s favorite scent or their favorite brand of perfume, that makes sense because you’re trying to target your marketing campaign towards them with this data. But if the data you’re asking for doesn’t make sense, don’t ask it. 

So these are the six reasons why people might be leaving your website. I know your website is pretty and you spent a lot of time and money on it, but people still might be leaving it. Thankfully, this is something you can fix!