Why visitors leave your website in ten seconds

Someone finally lands on your website. They've heard your name, or they found you in a search, and they've given you about ten seconds to be worth their time. Most businesses lose them in that window, and it's rarely because the site looks bad.

It's because the visitor arrives with three questions and the page answers none of them: what is this, is it for me, and what happens if I click.

The four things that lose people

• The first screen says something vague. “Excellence you can trust” tells a visitor nothing. “Family dentist in Kelowna, taking new patients” tells them everything.
• There's no obvious next step. If a page offers five equal choices, most people take none of them. One clear action, repeated, beats a menu of maybes.
• It's slow, or it fights the phone. Most visitors are on a phone with one thumb. If the text is small, the buttons are tight, or the page takes a few seconds to appear, they're gone before they've read a word.
• The way to reach you is buried. A phone number in the footer only, or a contact form that asks for nine fields, quietly turns interested people into people who meant to call.

A ten-minute test you can run yourself

Open your website on your phone, on mobile data, not your office wi-fi. Give it to someone who doesn't know your business, and ask them three questions: what do we do, who is it for, and what would you click. Don't help them. Whatever they hesitate on is the thing to fix first.

Then do the same for two competitors. It's uncomfortable and it's useful, because that's the comparison your customers are actually making.

Why we score this separately

“How your website works” is one of the five areas in a Brand Score, worth 20 points on its own. It sits apart from how you look on purpose. A beautiful site that hides the phone number is still a site that loses customers, and a plain site that makes the next step obvious can quietly outperform it.