10 Ways to Make Visitors Stay on Your Website for Longer

How long do visitors typically spend on your website? According to HubSpot, more than half of all online users spend less than 15 seconds when visiting a website.

1) Clean Up the Design

If your website features a cluttered design with an excessive number of visual elements all crammed together, you’ll struggle to capture visitors’ attention, resulting in a shorter session duration.

2) Improve Navigation

The way in which your website’s navigation is structured will affect how long visitors stay. Displaying a link to each individual page in a sidebar or header menu isn’t an effective strategy.

3) Publish Long-Form Content

Long-form content has become the cornerstone of an effective search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. In addition to driving higher search rankings, though, it also encourages visitors to stay on your website for longer.

4) Use Contextual Internal Links

You can keep visitors on your website for longer by guiding them to other relevant pages on your website. The more pages a visitor accesses, the longer he or she will likely stay.

5) Limit Use of External Links

Use caution when adding external links to your website’s content. Unlike internal links, these links send visitors away from your website, so using too many may result in a shorter average session duration.

6) Optimise for Mobile Viewing

Unless your website is optimizer for mobile viewing, though, these mobile users may encounter usability problems like hard-to-read font sizes, touch points too close together and horizontal scrolling, in which case they’ll quickly back out of your site.

7) Add Images to Text

Images do more than just improve the aesthetics of your website; they help convey messages presented in the adjacent text while also encouraging visitors to stay for longer.

8) Publish Videos

Whether you host them yourself or embed them from YouTube, publishing videos on your website may encourage visitors to stay for longer.

9) Cut Back on Ads

Publishing ads on behalf of another company or an ad network is a great way to monetise your website.

10) Improve Speed

Fast-loading website usually have a longer average session duration than slow-loading websites. With high-speed broadband services becoming more common, visitors expect websites to load almost instantly after clicking a search listing or link.

Attracting visitors to your website is only beneficial for your online business if they stay for a meaningful amount of time.