Summary: Users often leave Web pages in
10-20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold
people's attention for much longer because visit-durations follow a
negative Weibull distribution.
How long will users stay on a Web page before leaving? It's a perennial question, yet the answer has always been the same:
- Not very long.
As users rush through Web pages, they have time to read only a quarter of the text on the pages they actually visit (let alone all those they don't). So, unless your writing is extraordinarily clear and focused, little of what you say on your website will get through to customers.
However, while users are always in a hurry on the Web, the time they spend on individual page visits varies widely: sometimes people bounce away immediately, other times they linger for far longer than a minute. Given this, the average is not the most fruitful way of analyzing user behaviors. Users are human beings — their behaviors are highly variable and are not captured fully by a single number
