41% of visitors exit at homepage - advice?

something wrong with my website?.....

[miammiam]

Hi

On checking my user stats, I find that the most popular exit page is the main page '/' - 15% of visitors exit here (actually if you add the '/blank' pages that load on entry as well its a whopping 41%!. I am a little worried about this - anyone else got any similar experience - should I be worried? One thought I have is that on dial-up, the photos on our main page may take a while to load, causing people to give up and go? on the other hand, maybe visitors are just not finding what they want from the homepage? Would appreciate your views...

Stats for Feb 2004 so far:

Top 10 of 210 Total Exit Pages

# Visits URL

1 1432 15.79% /
2 1245 13.73% /blank.html
3 1117 12.31% /blank1.html
4 612 6.75% /x3.html
5 499 5.50% /blank2.html
6 492 5.42% /x1.html
7 456 5.03% /back.html
8 365 4.02% /x2.html
9 287 3.16% /z3251.html
10 200 2.20% /x0.html

[edited by: miammiam at 12:10 pm (utc) on Feb. 19, 2004]

[sem4u]

Maybe they are put off by the spammy redirect...

Also you should remove those links from your post.

[jweighell]

Yeah, you should get rid of your links! Although it did give me chance to look at it and, not sure what it was, but there was nothing appealing there that make me want to go any further!

Maybe you should display a few sample products along with the prices. The would give a better impression of what you sell and the price range.

[miammiam]

thanks - links gone.

[jpjones]

Another thought you should be thinking is this:
Where are your users coming from?
A search engine, or a review from another site?

Does the content relating to your site on the referring page accurately depict what the visitor is seeing on the landing page, or is the expectation totally different from the reality?

If the user doesn't get what they are expecting, a significant % will tend to go no further.

[crosenblum]

Can you sticky us the url, so we can check it out.

Sometimes it's not something you can mathematically analyze, but you can get a good gut feeling buy comparing how usable and valueable your site is.

When you send your site link, also send a couple competitors, so we know how you compare.

[danieljean]

the photos on our main page may take a while to load

Check your logs. Is the whole image loading? Are all of them sent to the client?

Surely there are some tools out there that can analyze this for you...