Are You Encouraging Visitors to Leave Your Site?
Are you waving goodbye to website visitors and encouraging them to leave your site before they’ve had a good look around? Keep them on your site for as long as possible with one very simple addition to your url links. Simply set all your clickable links open in a new window. This allows a visitor to open a link that you’ve included, while remaining on your site for longer.
Setting links to open in a new window is very easy. When adding a url to a page or post, simply tick the box or select from the drop down menu, normally labelled as “Target” or “Target Window” and choose ‘Open in a New Window’.
Depending on your visitor’s browser, this will open the link in a new window or new tab, while keeping them on your site as well and encouraging them to keep reading and looking around.
As a general rule of thumb, if the link is to somewhere else within your own site – it can open in the same window as the visitor is still remaining on your site. If the link is to another site – use open new window.
Melinda is the founder of SuperWAHM.com and started this site to share her best work from home ideas to help other Work At Home Mums become more financially independent and able to spend time with their families.
@ Bec, I’d never considered that it might be bad website etiquette, I have to say that I’m wondering if that comes from the days when internet was slow and opening a new window could cause everything to crash etc. Since most (all?) browsers now have the functionality of tabs it wouldn’t seem such a big deal. Totally my opinion of course, and I’m sure everyone else has their own!
@ Dennis I don’t know, I would have thought that was overkill but hey, it’s your site!
See now I’m totally paranoid of readers losing navigation so I open ALL new windows…including other pages within the blog.
‘s that wrong? 🙂
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It’s actually considered bad web design juju to target=”_blank” users are supposed to be able to decide if they want the link to open in or the same one.
Personally I choose to have my links open in a new window because that’s the way I want it and the way I prefer my links to open.
@ Robin It’s funny how often such a simple thing can be so important isn’t it!
@ Ken Thanks for the reminder, I meant to include that if the link is within your site then it’s ok to open in the same window. I’ve now edited the post to include that.
People browsing the internet generally won’t go back to the site once they’ve left it, there are so many statistics to prove that. It’s a much better idea to keep them on the site in the first place!
Totally agree, and its amazing how many people miss this. They always think ‘oh, the user can always hit the back button to get back to my site’. That may be true but I think its important to realize that just because that’s easy for you to say, it doesn’t mean that all users think along the same lines – don’t over estimate them. If I’m adding to the blog and I link to another site I set it to open in a new window. If I’m linking to a product on my site I set it to open in the same.
Great bit of information. I realized this sometime back. It’s good and simple information that many may not realize is one of the culprits.