Yesterday, I came across an article about how the Jewish online magazine Tablet is dealing with comments. It has decided to charge a fee to allow people to comment in order to make it harder for trolls to post obnoxious (and often anti-Semitic) comments. But there is an unintended consequence, and that is that legitimate commenters will now be dissuaded from commenting as well. The barrier to entry may prove too high.

Many websites have barriers to entry. Some are easily "climbed" and some are like Everest, impossible. Generally these barriers are subscription fees, sign up forms, or registration requirements.

In an effort to generate money from online readers, newspapers have added online subscription fees. That's a high barrier to entry. Some websites require registration, generally your email and a password. That's also a medium barrier to entry.  Yet other websites splash a newsletter sign-up before you can read the content, but generally you can close that out making it a low barrier to entry.

There are good reasons to create these barriers. After all, you may want to grow your marketing database or get some insight into who is visiting your website, or like many newspapers, you are looking for a source of revenue.

But barriers are not just mechanical. Your barriers to entry may be psychological. By that I mean that you may have barriers that have nothing to do with sign-ups and subscriptions, but more with to do with thought. For example, your website navigation may not be intuitive and may make it hard to for visitors to find what they are looking for.

A more subtle barrier is the language that you choose to use on your website. Many tech and government websites are flush with jargon that is nearly unintelligible to an outsider. Some websites make it hard for visitors by having too much information (or too many words) to sort through.

If you have been seeing a low conversion rate on your website, a drop in visitors, or a high bounce rate, perhaps you need to examine whether you have created an unintended barrier to entry or have built a barrier to entry that is too high.

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