Why do people leave your website? How to tell and what to do about it

Work on your site’s going well—ideas are flowing, metrics are improving, and business is booming. Or that’s what you think, when—BAM!—you notice a sudden drop in your website conversions and try not to panic.

It’s frustrating when people lose interest and drop off your site, whether they’re loyal, long-term customers or first-time visitors. 

High drop-off rates can make you feel like a substitute teacher: doing your best to hold your students’ attention, but quite aware they’re restless, waiting for lunch, and could be pulled away by a smartphone notification any second. 

While some level of website user drop-off is inevitable, you need to investigate why and when users disengage with your fantastic offer—so you can win back their attention and, ultimately, increase conversion rates. 

Anything could be causing drop-offs; from broken elements to slow-loading pages or complicated user flows. You need to quickly identify and fix the problem before it negatively affects your customer experience and bottom line—but how?

This article gives you 7 powerful techniques to find out where people drop off your site—and why—so you can address the problem, inspire user engagement, and improve conversions.

Understanding the 3 types of website users

When you set out to improve conversion rates, where do you focus your attention? Do you obsess over the visitors who leave your website without buying?

As the founder and former CEO of Hotjar, part of the Contentsquare group, David Darmanin made that mistake for years—but when he switched his focus and started looking at the users who did convert, he saw real results.

David Darmanin is an entrepreneur and consultant who has generated hundreds of millions of dollars for businesses large and small

What David learned was that he needed to study a special subset of paying customers so he could tailor his website and products to their needs.

It all comes down to 3 different types of users who visit your website (segmented by their level of interest and the likelihood that they’ll convert):

• Just-Browsing Wanderers: these visitors are just passing through—whether they’re researching, checking out the competition, or clicking by accident. Since they were never going to buy, their drop-off isn’t a sign that something’s broken.

• Determined Heroes: no matter how many hurdles you throw their way, these buyers push through and convert. Great for sales, but not for learning why other users drop off—they’ll buy despite the friction, not because the experience is smooth.

• Undecided Explorers: these are the ones to watch. They fit your ideal customer profile but hesitate due to usability issues or doubts. Understanding what almost stopped them can reveal the real roadblocks preventing more conversions.

7 steps to uncover the reasons why people leave your website

Some Undecided Explorers won’t make it through your sales funnel, but others will push past their objections to give you their money—and these can offer you valuable feedback.

They’ll highlight many of the same qualified objections that prevented their non-buying counterparts from converting.

Basically, they’ll point out the reasons why your prospects leave your website. 

Once you address their concerns, you can convert more Explorers. You can also turn some of your existing customers (Explorers and Heroes alike) into promoters, and these fans will provide free word-of-mouth advertising by recommending you to their friends and colleagues.

Here are 7 steps to identify these qualified objections and increase engagement and retention.

1. Create a customer journey map

How you define a ‘drop-off’ depends on the nature of your business, and the funnel or flow users are abandoning. If you run an ecommerce site, for example, drop-off might refer to users who add an item to their cart and view the checkout page—but close the tab before parting with any cash.

To define your important flows, create a customer journey map that details the steps users typically take when completing a valuable action on your site, like buying a product, subscribing to your service, or using important features. 

For your purchase flow (or sales funnel), this might look like

• Users navigating to and browsing a product page

• Adding an item to cart

• Checking out 

• Filling out delivery and card information

• Clicking ‘pay now’ 

Now that you’ve identified a sequence users are dropping out of, here’s how to pinpoint exactly where you’re losing the crowd—and why. 

2. Study web analytics 

Web analytics tools collect hard (quantitative) data on your users and track important metrics, so you can review and spot patterns, and find drop-off points.

They help you monitor important metrics like

• Bounce rates: the percentage of your users who land on one page, then immediately leave your site without taking any action. Pages with high bounce rates are failing to engage your users, causing them to drop off. 

• Exit rates: the percentage of page views that end with a user leaving your site. For example, if your landing page has a high exit rate, you need to determine what’s causing users to leave, so you can fix the issue and increase engagement and retention

• Flows: track a sequence of user actions within a flow (e.g. a user visiting your website, logging into their account, and using a particular feature) to identify what percentage of users make it from one step to the next. 

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability to map out your user flows and instantly see where users drop off versus where they move forward. A clear visual of drop-off rates at each step makes it easy to spot trouble areas.

When your team can see these patterns at a glance, it sparks better conversations and ideas for boosting engagement. And if you want to dig deeper, Contentsquare lets you jump straight into session replays (more on that later) to watch real Undecided Explorers navigating those tricky steps. Seeing exactly where they hesitate or abandon the journey helps you understand what’s causing friction—and how to fix it.

Use Contentsquare Journey Analysis to see where users are dropping off

3. Get direct feedback from your users

If you want to find out exactly what’s going on in your users’ minds when they drop off, there’s no substitute for asking them directly. 

Not all feedback is created equal. Some methods will give you broad trends, while others dig into the nitty-gritty details. Here’s how to get the insights that matter.

Capture feedback at the moment of conversion

When Explorers complete a purchase, they’re still in the mindset of their buying journey—making it the perfect time to ask what almost stopped them.

Set up a post-purchase survey with questions like

• On a scale of 1–5, how would you rate your buying experience?

  • If they answer 1–3, follow up with: “How can we improve the experience?”

  • If they answer 4 or 5, ask: “What did you love most about the experience?”

• What nearly stopped you from completing your purchase?

This last question is gold because it reveals real friction points from users who were on the fence. If several customers mention the same hesitation, you’ve just found a roadblock you can fix to prevent future drop-offs.

Catch users before they leave with exit-intent surveys

For those Explorers who don’t convert, an exit-intent survey can help uncover why they’re leaving. This survey triggers when a user moves to close the tab or navigate away, asking a simple question like

• “We’re sorry to see you go! What’s your reason for leaving?”

  • Provide multiple-choice options for quick insights (e.g., “Just browsing,” “Found a better deal elsewhere,” “Confused by pricing,” etc.)

• “What could we do to improve?”

Because it appears right at the moment of drop-off, this method gives you raw, immediate insights into why users abandon their journey. If multiple users say they were confused about pricing, for instance, it might be time to revisit how clearly your costs are displayed.

💡Pro tip: Contentsquare offers a free exit-intent survey template you can launch and customize in a matter of minutes. It’s short and snappy with

• One multiple-choice question to collect quantitative insights

• One open-ended question to collect your users’ opinions in their own words

A simple survey can give you the insights you need to make impactful changes

Go deeper with user interviews

Surveys give you data. Interviews give you stories. If you need deeper insights, reach out to Explorers who engaged with your site in the past but haven’t returned in a while. A quick 15-minute chat can point you to insights about their adventures that surveys alone might miss.

Ask open-ended questions like

• “What was your initial impression of our product?”

• “What made you stop using it?”

• “What would make you return?”

During interviews, users often share frustrations they didn’t even realize they had—like a feature that didn’t work as expected or an onboarding step that felt confusing. These small but significant insights can lead to meaningful improvements.

💡 Pro tip: if you don’t have a few weeks to spare to organize your own user 1-on-1 chats, use Contentsquare’s Interviews capability to streamline the experience. 

It simplifies the process of recruiting participants and offers a straightforward platform to host and analyze interviews. That way, you can focus on hearing first-hand about any user experience (UX) problems behind your drop-off rates.

Contentsquare helps you easily schedule, host, and analyze user interviews

Tap into sales and support teams for real-world feedback

Your sales and customer support teams are on the front lines, hearing first hand why users hesitate or drop off. Regularly check in with them to spot patterns in

• Common objections that prevent people from purchasing

• Frequent frustrations that cause users to abandon their journey

• Confusing product messaging that leads to misunderstandings

If support keeps hearing, “I didn’t realize this feature was included” or “I thought I had to pay extra for that,” it might be time to revisit your website’s clarity around pricing and features.

4. Watch session replays to see drop-off moments first hand

Once you’ve gathered feedback from users about their struggles, it’s time to see those issues in action. Session recordings or replays allow you to watch real user interactions on your site, so you can pinpoint exactly where users get stuck, frustrated, or distracted.

If an Explorer mentions in a survey that they had trouble completing a purchase, session recordings let you see what happened:

• Did they repeatedly click a button that wasn’t working? 

• Did they hesitate for a long time at the payment step? 

• Did they scroll up and down, seemingly lost?

Watching their experience helps you understand their pain points beyond what they could explain in a survey.

 When you analyze session recordings, look out for

• How users interact with page elements, or how they fail to, so you can identify broken calls to action (CTAs) and items that look clickable but aren’t

• Any unusual mouse activity, like rage clicks, wild scrolling, or u-turns, which usually indicate broken elements or rendering issues

• How users move around pages, including how long they stick around and how far down they scroll, so you can tell whether the info on a page is sufficiently interesting to retain users’ attention

If you want to pinpoint exactly where users are dropping off, watching every session just isn’t realistic. But with the right tools, you can focus on the sessions that matter most. Here’s how to use Contentsquare’s Session Replay capability to zero in on the insights that’ll make a real impact:

• Capture the moments that count with event-triggered recordings. These automatically track sessions where users leave feedback or respond to surveys, giving you a direct line to their thoughts when it matters most.

• Let AI-powered prioritization do the heavy lifting. It highlights sessions where users hesitate, rage-click, or drop off, so you can quickly tackle the most pressing areas for improvement.

Compare the behavior of users who rated their experience highly versus poorly. This will reveal the small but powerful differences that could be the key to improving overall satisfaction.

Analyze and quantify issues identified in Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer (VoC) systems in a single click

5. Use heatmaps to see where users lose interest

Heatmaps are visual representations that show which parts of a page are popular (i.e. hot, which is often red) or unpopular (i.e. cold, often blue), highlighting friction points responsible for drop-off and helping you understand how engaging users find your site. 

Instead of guessing where the problem is, heatmaps give you a visual representation of where users are engaging and where they’re not. The goal is to figure out what’s working and what’s causing them to lose interest.

There are 4 types of heatmaps: 

• Click maps, which show the most- and least-clicked elements on a page

• Scroll maps, which show how far down a page users scroll 

• Move maps, which show mouse movement as users navigate through a page

• Engagement zones, which show the areas on a page where users spend the most time interacting

By studying these maps, you can start asking the right questions:

• Can Explorers easily find your CTAs? If they can’t, they’re not going to act. Think about repositioning buttons or making them stand out more.

• Are they scrolling far enough to see what matters? If they’re dropping off too early, move your critical content higher up the page or make it more engaging to encourage users to stick around.

• Are they distracted by elements that aren’t clickable? If they’re hovering or interacting with something that’s not functional, that could be causing confusion and frustration.

Once you see where users are getting stuck or disengaged, make adjustments to keep them moving forward and reduce the chances of losing them.

Contentsquare’s Heatmaps capability helps you pinpoint which website areas keep your users’ attention

6. Run a technical analysis to identify hidden barriers 

When users drop off, the reason is often simpler than you think. Sometimes, in the pursuit of improving your site, something important gets broken. For instance, maybe your product page no longer loads correctly on certain browsers, causing a spike in abandoned carts or dropped subscribers.

To catch these issues before they impact your users, regularly run technical analyses across your site—or let Contentsquare’s Experience Monitoring do it for you. 

Here’s how you can stay on top of performance issues:

• Track errors in real-time: catch issues like JavaScript or API errors as they happen and fix them based on their impact on users and conversions

• Monitor load speed: use Speed Analysis to see exactly how your pages are performing in real-time and prioritize improvements on high-impact pages that will keep users from bouncing before they even get started

• Optimize for mobile: identifying and fixing mobile-specific issues quickly means fewer frustrated users and a smoother conversion path across all platforms

7. Conduct user tests for real-time feedback

Usability testing—watching users navigate your site in real-time—adds another layer of insight to your research:

• Surveys give you valuable insights into what users think about your website

  • Session replays let you watch when users move through your site at a point in time

    • Heatmaps show where users click or hover as they browse

      • User testing reveals how they interact with your site in real time

User testing allows you to observe Explorers in action, asking them questions as they engage with specific parts of your site. This lets you get to the heart of any confusion or friction points.

For example, let's say your on-page surveys indicate users are frustrated during checkout. User testing software gives you the chance to watch users as they go through the process—seeing exactly where they hesitate or get stuck. Are they unsure about a form field? Or did they miss a key piece of information that leads them to abandon their cart?

An example of an unmoderated user test

Bouncing back from high drop-off rates

Diving into the reasons behind website drop-offs can be a humbling experience, especially if you uncover obvious UX issues that would make it hard for any user to stay engaged on your site. Every product or website has its bumps, but the real challenge—and opportunity—lies in figuring out what those are by truly observing and understanding your users.

Once you’ve identified the issues behind those drop-offs, focus on addressing the key objections that are stopping your Explorers in their tracks. If users are hesitant because they don’t see the value in your product, don’t offer a guarantee—make the benefits clear. If they don’t trust you, show them why they should. And if they’re on the fence, give them reasons to take action now.

An experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare allows you to go beyond basic analytics. Watch how users interact with your site, and ask them directly what’s causing frustration. This gives you actionable insights to fix problems that might not show up in data alone.

Even if the resolution ends up being as simple as fixing a broken link, approach the problem with empathy for users, and you'll see a significant increase in your conversion rates.

FAQ about website user drop-off