What Makes Someone Leave Your Website?

Vandelay Design has a list of some of the most common things that cause people to leave your website. While it’s not a good idea to obsess over keeping people on your site, it’s worth reading up on how to optimize your site to promote staying longer.

Part of having a successful website is attracting visitors. Keeping those visitors on your site, however, is another topic altogether. Of course, once you have the visitor on your site you’ll want to keep them around for a while rather than seeing them quickly leaving to go somewhere else.

In order to do a good job of retaining visitors, increasing pageviews and time on the site, it’s important to think about what could cause visitors to leave. By knowing some of the major reasons that people are leaving your site, you can make adjustments to improve this situation.

The list covers the main areas that you want to pay attention to to successfuly optimize your site in this manner, which pretty much fall into the categories of content, design, and advertisements. Keep in mind though, that if people notice that you are actively trying to keep them on your site, it will be a major turn off. So don’t

  • Be stingy with outgoing links
  • Open external links in pop-up windows
  • Try to disable the Back button

Stay away from little tricks like that that hinder the user experience.