5 Website Features That Drive Away Customers

Your website might be chasing people away

You're investing in marketing. People are finding your website. But they're leaving before they ever pick up the phone or fill out a form.

Sometimes the problem isn't that your website is ugly or outdated. It's that it has features actively driving people away. Here are the five worst offenders.

1. Aggressive popups

Nothing says "we don't respect your time" like hitting a visitor with a popup before they've read a single word on your page.

The worst versions:

• Immediate popups — the page hasn't even finished loading
• Multiple popups — a newsletter signup, then a chat widget, then a discount offer
• Exit-intent popups on mobile — where they're nearly impossible to close
• Popups that hide the close button — forcing people to engage or leave entirely

Here's the truth: if someone can't close your popup easily on a phone, they're closing the tab instead. Google also penalizes intrusive interstitials on mobile, so aggressive popups can hurt your search rankings too.

If you use a popup, follow these rules: wait at least 30 seconds, make it easy to close, only show it once per session, and make sure the offer is actually worth the interruption.

2. Autoplay video with sound

This should be obvious in 2025, but it still happens. Someone clicks through to your website at work, in a waiting room, or late at night — and suddenly audio is blasting from their phone or computer.

The result is immediate, instinctive, and always the same: they close the tab. They don't look for a mute button. They don't pause it. They leave.

Background video without sound can work well for visual impact. But the moment you force audio on someone, you've lost them. If you have video content, let people choose to play it.

3. Slow page load

This is the silent killer. Your website looks great on your desktop at the office, so you assume it loads fast everywhere. It doesn't.

What causes slow load times:

• Uncompressed images (the number one culprit for small business sites)
• Too many plugins or scripts running at once
• Cheap hosting that can't handle concurrent visitors
• No caching or CDN setup
• Heavy fonts loading from external servers

The benchmark: your site should load in under 3 seconds on a mobile connection. You can test this for free at Google's PageSpeed Insights. If you're above 3 seconds, you're losing a meaningful percentage of visitors before they see anything.

4. Terrible mobile experience

More than 60% of web traffic is mobile. If your site doesn't work perfectly on a phone, the majority of your visitors are having a bad experience.

Common mobile problems:

• Text too small to read without pinching and zooming
• Buttons too small or too close together — fat-finger problems
• Horizontal scrolling — content wider than the screen
• Navigation that doesn't collapse into a usable mobile menu
• Forms that are impossible to fill out on a small screen

This isn't optional anymore. Mobile-first design means designing for the phone experience first and scaling up to desktop, not the other way around. Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it judges your site primarily by its mobile version.

5. No phone number (or it's buried)

For local businesses, this one is staggering. People search for your service, land on your site, decide they want to call you — and they can't find the number.

Your phone number should be:

• In the header on every page (clickable on mobile)
• In the hero section of your homepage
• On your contact page (obviously)
• In the footer of every page

If someone has to go hunting for how to contact you, most of them won't bother. They'll hit the back button and call the next business on the list. The same goes for your address if you're a business that people visit in person.

The common thread

All five of these problems share one thing: they prioritize the business's preferences over the visitor's experience. Popups serve your email list. Autoplay serves your brand video. Slow sites serve your budget. Bad mobile serves your desktop design. Hidden contact info serves... nobody, actually.

Your website exists to make it as easy as possible for someone to choose your business. Every feature should be evaluated by one question: does this help the visitor, or does this get in their way?

If it gets in the way, cut it.