How many visitors are leaving your pages early?

Unless you have a very small web page, let's say less than 5k, it is probable that some of your visitors are moving on before your web page has even finished loading.

This may not be as bad as it initially sounds. If your site is like mine there are a lot of links to articles or features that the user may pick before the current page finishes loading. That's not really a loss. Having said that, there are some well-known points you should bear in mind when trying to get your page to load (or appear to load) quickly. I'm not going to go into detail - there are plenty of how-to HTML sites out there - but at least keep your tables small, and always specify width/height for images and tables.

This article is about how to detect those visitors "leaving early".

Initially you might be tempted to put in code like this, that counts the headers and footers viewed. The difference is the number of pages that weren't fully viewed:

// increment application variable at top of page Application.Lock ( ); Application ( 'HeadersViewed' )++; Application.Unlock ( ); // ...page content goes here... // increment application variable at bottom of page Application.Lock ( ); Application ( 'FootersViewed' )++; Application.Unlock ( );

Part 2: But you'll be pleasantly surprised...