Silent Churn: The Customers Who Leave Without Telling You
I need to tell you the truth about myself.
When I hit a barrier on a website, it may be:
text I can't read
a form that I struggle to fill out
a checkout that won't cooperate
I don't report it. I don't email support. I don't fill out the feedback form. I close the tab and I leave.
Me. The person who built an entire business around accessibility. The person who spent eight years teaching people how to fix exactly these problems.
Here's why: I have spent my whole life advocating for myself. Every day comes with a a disability tax of always having to explain, request, adjust, and ask the world to meet me partway. And most days, I am over it. I don't have the energy to write a thoughtful email to a stranger's business explaining what their website did wrong and hoping someone reads it. I just want to buy the thing. If I can't, someone else will sell it to me.
And it turns out I'm not the exception. I'm the rule.
Research on disabled online shoppers found that when a customer with a disability hits a barrier on a website, only 8% will ever contact the business about it. The other 92% do exactly what I do: leave silently.
So if you've been assuming that no complaints means no problem, I beg to differ.
I'm the proof that it doesn't.
Your most experienced, most articulate, most professionally qualified users to report accessibility issues are often the most exhausted by them. We're probably the last people who'll tell you.
Your analytics will record us as... nothing in particular. A bounce. An abandoned cart. An unsubscribe with no reason selected.
I call this silent churn, and last week's post about the subtitle effect explained why it stays silent: most accessibility needs don't have a toggle. There's no button to press, so there's no data trail, so there's no line item on any report telling you what just happened.
But researchers have measured it. And the numbers are bigger than almost anyone expects.
The £17 billion nobody noticed leaving
The best data we have comes from the UK's Click-Away Pound study, which surveyed disabled online shoppers about what they actually do when a website doesn't work for them. Here's what they found:
69% simply click away from a site they find difficult to use. No complaint. No second chance.
83% limit their shopping to sites they already know are accessible. Read that one again: most of these shoppers aren't even evaluating new businesses anymore. If your site isn't already on their trusted list, you were never in the running.
86% have paid more for a product from an accessible site rather than buy the same thing cheaper from a site that was harder to use. Accessibility beats price.
And the problem continues to grow.
The lost spending, the money that clicked away to more accessible competitors, grew from £11.75 billion in 2016 to £17.1 billion in 2019. Meanwhile, 72% of users with access needs reported hitting barriers on more than a quarter of the websites they visited for the first time. Three years of awareness campaigns and legislation, and the web barely improved.
That's the UK alone. Now add everyone the subtitle effect taught us about: the people with no diagnosed disability who still need readable contrast, clear structure, and text that works when images don't load. The aging eyes. The sunlit phone screens. The skimmers. Silent churn isn't a niche leak. It's a slow drain running under your whole business.
Where silent churn hides in your metrics
Here's the uncomfortable exercise. Silent churn never labels itself, but it does leave fingerprints. It looks like:
A mobile bounce rate that's worse than desktop. Some of that is impatience. Some of it is light gray text on a white background, unreadable in daylight.
Email click rates that seem low for how good your open rates are. If your call-to-action button is an image and the image doesn't load or the contrast fails resulting in people opening, trying, and giving up.
Cart and checkout abandonment. Tiny form labels, unlabeled fields, low-contrast error messages. The customer wanted to buy. The page wouldn't let them.
Course sign-ups that stall at the sales page. A wall of text with no heading structure is exhausting for everyone and impossible for anyone navigating by headings.
Unsubscribes with no reason given. Because "your emails are hard for me to read" is a reason almost nobody types into a survey box.
None of these will ever say "accessibility" in your dashboard. That's the whole trick of it.
This is not your fault (really)
Before you spiral: if your website or emails have these issues, you are not careless and you are not alone.
WebAIM analyzes the top one million website homepages every year, and the 2025 results found that 79% fail minimum color contrast requirements and over half are missing alt text on images. The average homepage has around 51 accessibility errors on it.
Fifty-one. On the average page. Built by professionals, agencies, and big brands with entire teams.
The reason is simple: the tools never told anyone.
Your website builder lets you pick that trendy light gray.
Your email platform lets you skip the alt text field.
Nothing flagged it, nothing warned you, and your audience, as we've established, wasn't going to say anything either. You can't fix a problem that stays invisible at every single step.
The fix is visibility
You don't need to become an accessibility expert. You don't need an audit that costs more than your website did. You need the problems to become visible at the moment you can actually fix them, while you're writing the email, building the page, setting up the course.
That's exactly why I built Successible. It's a Chrome extension that works like spellcheck for accessibility: as you work, it flags things like low contrast, missing alt text, and skipped headings, and explains them in plain language. It’ll tell you what's wrong, and why it matters. No jargon, no WCAG homework, no guilt.
Because the customers who leave silently are never coming back to tell you why. But you can stop the next one from leaving at all.
Successible works on top of the platforms you already use: your website builder, your email platform, your course tool.
