Where a site quietly loses people

Nobody writes to say they gave up. They arrive, look for something, don’t find it, and leave, and the site records nothing more dramatic than a visit that lasted eleven seconds. Every site loses people this way. The question is where.

Some of the places are structural. A page that exists but is linked from nowhere, so the only visitors are the ones who already knew the address. In a recent review, six of the pages a site listed in its own sitemap were unreachable from its navigation, including the contact page and the two pages that explained how to apply for what the organization offers. The pages were fine. Nobody could get to them.

Some are a matter of speed. A page that takes four seconds to show anything loses a share of its visitors before it shows them anything, and on a phone with a weak signal that share is most of them. Often it is one oversized image. In that same review, one logo weighed twelve megabytes.

Some are at the moment of decision. A class listing without a price, so the visitor has to click through to find out whether to bother. A form with nine fields where three would do. A button that says Submit when the visitor wants to know what happens next. Each of these costs a few percent, and a few percent at the last step is most of the people who were about to say yes.

And some are invisible from the inside. The site answers at two addresses, with and without the www, and search engines split its credit between them. The description under the search result is missing, so the result is a bare address. A link shared to a chat app shows no title and no picture. The site is working exactly as built; it just isn’t being found, or isn’t being chosen when it is.

Finding these places is mostly a matter of looking, with the right tools and a regular habit:

• A crawl of the whole site, every few months, to find what is broken, orphaned, slow, or duplicated.
• The numbers, read for exits rather than totals. Where do people leave, and what were they looking at when they did?
• The path to the thing the site is for, walked from the outside, on a phone, as if you had never seen it.

None of this is dramatic. Most of the fixes are an afternoon each: a redirect, a smaller image, a link in the menu, a price on the listing. What makes the difference is that somebody looks, and then somebody fixes it. That is a large part of what I do for the sites I look after.