How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?
It turns out you have 10 seconds to convince someone that your website is valuable to them. If ever there was an argument for brevity in design, this is it.
Jakob Nielsen posted about a research project that studied how long users were likely to remain on a web page. The fascinating conclusion was that 99% of Web pages had a “negative aging effect” — the longer a user has been on your page, the less likely they are to leave at that particular time. There’s a graph in the original article which illustrates this curve quite clearly.
Here’s the really interesting part: After 30 seconds, users leave your site at a much slower rate. So, if you can convince someone to stay for at least half a minute, there’s a good chance they’ll stick around for a while longer.
