Attracting people to a website is hard, keeping someone on a website is even harder. I’ve worked in the digital communications space for more than eight years now and I’ve worked on, fixed and audited more websites than I care to recall.

What makes a bad website? In my experience it comes down to two things:

  1. Lack of a clear vision for the site
    We’ve all seen this website; no two pages have the same look and feel, interactive features (eg. videos and podcasts) are used inconsistently and content is often dated and stale.
  2. Not thinking of the end-user
    The sole purpose of this website is for the company or person to talk about themselves. Simple things like a clean navigation suffer because of things like industry jargon and acronyms no one outside the organization knows.

I came across this infographic from the folks at KissMetrics and I thought it summarized the top issues that drive people away very well. For me, my top annoyances are: gated content (being forced to give my email address to get access the information) bad navigation and too many ads.

What are your top website annoyances?

What Makes Someone Leave A Website?

Source: What Makes Someone Leave A Website?