There are a very few things more satisfying than having people appreciate your website through a comment, post, like, tweet, or sale. Attention brings confidence to yourself with the knowledge that your website it creating traffic and doing what you intended to do with it.
Unfortunately, things don’t always go to plan and it becomes harder and harder to get appreciation or attention from visitors of your site. Since we live in an era of where efficiency rains supreme over all other aspects of online life, skimming websites and the availability of information is at ones finger tips, keeping online visitors short attention spans enticed to stay on your website for more than a few seconds is getting harder.
It is difficult to convince visitors that their time on your site will be worth while, as on average, a visitor will leave your website within 10-20 seconds of loading the page. If your website is having a hard time gaining traffic, here are a few tips on why visitors leave your website.
Problems With Loading Speed
Modern Internet users have been spoiled with the lightening quick loading speed. According to Kissmetrics, an online statistical data base, 47 percent of visitors to a website expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40 percent of visitors leave a site if the loading process takes any longer than 3 seconds. People like to be in control of their destiny and not to be subjected to the computer’s whims.
The Difference Between 1 second and 3 seconds
If an application responds immediately to a visitors actions, it give an appearance of direct manipulation. It makes the user think that the result was generated by their action and not by the computer. The result of direct manipulation is a great key to increase user engagement. If the response time is 1 second, the user will notice the small delay and feel like the system is generating the results instead of them, but they will focus more on their train of thought, after which they retain the sense of control a little. A web page ideally takes one second to load to give the users the feeling that they can navigate freely. If any webpage takes 5 seconds or longer to load, the user will no longer feel in control and the likelihood of them leaving your site skyrockets. No matter how innovating your content is, or how many guest posts you write to attract traffic, people will not keep waiting at the door of your site for you to answer, especially when they can access your competitors site faster.
Website Layout
Another reason why a substantial amount of your traffic might “bounce” could be because of your website’s structure. The solution is a website overhaul. User’s don’t actually read the content on a website, they scan content. Think of an un-optimized web design as a communication problem whereby your targeted audience fails to clearly grasp or retain the key elements needed to make a decision during their stay on your website. There are many design principles and failure to implement them could be a reason behind the high bounce rate. For example, having a visual hierarchy tells readers what to read and in which order. The size of a texts font or the order in which text is placed is key in drawing the eye your visitors, you control how they explore your website.
Having Uninteresting Content
Many website owners spend an awful amount of time making their homepage interesting, and push the rest of the pages to the back burner. Think about this, when was the last time you actually entered a website through the homepage? Search patterns have changed drastically over the years. In 2012, 54 percent of consumers found websites through search engine results, 32 percent through social networks, and 28 percent said that they found websites through links from other websites. If your website targets older demographics, then listen up. According to a study done by Nielson and Norman group, they found that users who are 65 and older are 43 percent slower at using websites that their 21-55 year old counterparts. Make your content more interesting by making it more relate-able and react-able.
Click below for web development aid:
