Aug 01 2024
Things That Can Negatively Impact Your Website Visitor Numbers
If you want your business to be a success, you need your website to work as it's intended to work - you need it to bring in visitors, keep them there, and, ideally, you need them to then contact you or make a purchase, depending on how your business is set up. That should be easy, shouldn't it? Make a nice website and people will come to it - lots of people - and they'll all want to buy something.
Well, that would be a nice thing if it were true, but the fact is that gone are the days of setting up a website and people just finding it and coming to it without any effort on your part. Today, there are so many websites that the chances of someone stumbling on your specific one are minuscule, and even then, with so much competition, there's a lot that needs to be done to keep those visitor numbers up.
It's useful to know what factors might be negatively impacting your website visitor numbers in the first place - once you have that information, you can turn things around, make them better, and hopefully get your visitor numbers back up. Read on to find out what some of the issues might be.
It's incredibly frustrating when you want to look at something on a website and you experience slow load times, so just think about your visitors - they'll feel exactly the same way as you do. In the end, they'll probably just abandon the idea altogether and try somewhere else, meaning you lose a sale (and they may well not come back). Studies show that a delay of even a few seconds can be enough to send them away.
To improve load times, you need to optimize your images and videos, implement browser caching, use a content delivery network (CDN), and minimize HTTP requests. If all that sounds like a different language, don't worry - that's what outsourcing is for.
A lot of downtime and server issues can be another issue that turns visitors away from your site - if they keep trying and always find they can't get your site to load, soon enough they'll stop trying altogether. That's why you need to ensure your website has a reliable server to host it on, and you need to make it part of your weekly routine to check the uptime you've had - monitoring this will show when you've got a problem so you can put things right much more quickly.
SEO (search engine optimization) plays - or should play, and that might be the issue in a nutshell - a massive part in getting traffic to your website, but if you're not doing it right, the opposite is going to happen, and you'll find that no one goes there at all, mainly because they just can't find it. SEO is designed to make your website pop up in search engine results, and without it, that's not going to happen, people won't know you exist, and they definitely won't make it to your website.
The best thing to do when it comes to SEO is research search engine optimization agencies and leave the task in the capable hands of experts; they'll be able to conduct keyword research, create high-quality, original content, optimize your headers, metadata, and so on, building quality backlinks, and even ensure your site is mobile-friendly, all of which is vital if you want good SEO.
Broken links might not sound like that much of an issue because, after all, people can find information for themselves, can't they? If a link doesn't work, they'll just search for whatever it was the link was going to take them to with no harm done. Only the reality is that a lot of harm might be done because broken links can negatively impact both user experience and SEO - they're frustrating and they literally lead to lower search engine rankings because Google will penalize you for having them.
Make sure you're regularly checking for - and fixing - broken links, and you'll find your site does a lot better.
Having adverts on your website can be a useful source of extra income, but there's a fine line between what visitors will find acceptable and what they'll find to be too much. Anything that's a pop-up, anything that auto-plays, any anything that's so big it takes up a large chunk of the screen can be especially annoying, and it might make people not want to use your site.
You'll need to offset all of this against the income the ads are bringing, and if there are any that are causing problems, see if you can find an alternative if you definitely need to have them there.
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