How many seconds does the average website visit last?

How to get close to this number

Estimate from your own browsing, honestly. Think about the last ten pages you opened: how many did you read, and how many did you glance at and leave? The average is dragged down hard by the second group, so the answer has to be measured in tens of seconds rather than in minutes. Averages over human attention are almost always shorter than the average person believes.

The mistake is picturing a reader. Most sessions are not someone settling in with an article; they are a search result that did not answer the question, a link from social media, a mis-tap, or a bot-adjacent visit that loads and leaves. Once you model the distribution rather than the ideal visitor, a figure under a minute stops being surprising.

This number is also the commercial argument behind most of the web's worst design habits, which is worth naming. If almost nobody scrolls past the first screen, as the explanation says, then everything competes for that screen — and that is how pages end up with an interstitial, an autoplaying video and an ad above the content. This project takes the opposite lesson from the same figure, which is why nothing is ever placed above the game.