Tooltester is supported by readers like yourself. We may earn an affiliate commission when you purchase through our links, which enables us to offer our research for free.
Starting an online business takes a lot of time and patience. You have to focus on building effective communication with employees, ensure that site visitors have a great user experience, keep an eye on your analytics, and so many other daily tasks.
However, a lot of marketers and online business owners struggle with analytics and with specific statistics that are contained in a website’s data. One of their biggest pain points is their website’s bounce rates.
WHAT IS A BOUNCE RATE? In a nutshell, a bounce rate is the percentage of users who left your site after only visiting a single page.
High bounce rates mean that you are missing on conversion opportunities. Also, you will be unable to create a great customer journey if site visitors are leaving even before seeing what you have to offer.
What is a Good Bounce Rate?
Having a high bounce rate means that users are not browsing your website. They are simply landing on your site and leaving without checking out your other site pages.
Let’s say you have a blog, and your goal is for people to read more than one article. In the same way, if you have a company website, you want users to go beyond your homepage and then check out what you have to offer.
So, what is a good bounce rate?
Some agree that having an 80 percent bounce rate is great, while others will see it as damaging. Nonetheless, a good bounce rate will depend on your business’ goals.
Regardless, most site owners and managers want to decrease this troublesome number as much as they can. It is because bounce rates serve as a website usability indicator, which means that it can impact your search engine ranking.
That is precisely why you must learn how to improve your bounce rate. In this post, we will delve deeper on the nine effective ways on how you can improve your site’s bounce rates:
Speed Up Your Site
Your site speed plays a huge factor in determining whether or not a prospective lead will stay on your site. In fact, causing a one-second delay can have a significant impact on sales. For instance, a large company like Amazon can lose over one billion dollars for a one-second delay.
Most users expect a quick and clean experience. So, if you’re relatively unsure whether your site is up to par, well, you need to consider this: users expect that a site will load within two seconds. Otherwise, most of them will leave and move on to your competitors.
There are also two main areas that you need to focus on if you want to speed up your site: media elements and animations.
Media elements include videos and images. For images, reduce their size without decreasing their quality. Here are some online tools that could help you do that:
When it comes to videos, don’t host them on your server. Instead, upload them to Vimeo or YouTube and just embed them on your site.
Now, once you’re done limiting these media elements, it’s time to move on to animations. You must have as little as possible. The more scripts that your site needs to load, the slower it will become.
Use animations and elements that are only in HTML5. Stay away from those that use Flash or Java. Also, make sure to use a fast web host.
Publish High-Quality Content
Another effective way to increase the time a user spends on a page is by crafting high-quality content.
Because content creation is still an entirely different subject, “high-quality” content means that you’re creating the content a user is searching for. Ideally, it should be relevant to their search, and it should solve a particular pain point or problem in their lives.
Others are simply looking for a simple answer to their questions. If you could solve this and provide value to them, then it’s likely that they’ll come back and stick around.
Also, consider your content gaps and competitors so that you’ll have an idea of the type of content your audience wants but isn’t readily available.
QUICK TIP: As you continue to add more content and create more value to your audience, you’ll soon find that your bounce rates will likely shrink.
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Chances are, most users will be viewing your site from a plethora of devices. So, have you optimized for the site’s content to fit these various screens?
If the answer is no, then you have to.
On average, people pick up their phones approximately 58 times a day. In relation to this, 61 percent access the internet using their mobile phones.
With the growing number of people accessing the internet using their mobile devices each year, failing to optimize your site for mobile is like practically begging users to bounce on your page and look elsewhere.
Your site should have a responsive design to provide your mobile site visitors an excellent user experience.
Maximize the User Experience
You need to provide anyone who lands on your site with an optimal user experience. Meaning, your site should be:
- Relatively easy to navigate
- Easy to read
- Relevant to their needs
- Highly personalized
The elements that visitors should see on your page should reflect what you know from them.
Let’s say a user has visited your site before. You can offer content suggestions based on their previous interests.
Have a Highly Relevant CTA
In the same way, you should also be specific with the actions that you want users to take on your page after consuming whatever content you are offering.
Once you already know what you want them to do, you can prompt them to take action by providing a clear and precise CTA or call-to-action.
However, the more CTAs that you place on the page, the more that you will confuse your prospects and overwhelm them.
While it is great to have many CTAs on a single page, and you trust users to evaluate it before taking action, this does not happen often.
It should be effortless on the user’s part to find your CTA and take action without hassle. So, do not overwhelm them by providing a dozen of CTAs.
Think of your user’s intent and how these pages could achieve or accomplish their goal. And then include a relevant and clear call-to-action to help get the job done.
Use Exit-Extent Popups
Using pop-ups can increase your site’s bounce rate. Why? Well, for the most part, pop-ups annoy and frustrate a lot of people.
On the other hand, there is another category called exit-extent pop-ups. These pop-ups are known to reduce bounce rates.
But how? Well, unlike those annoying pop-us, exit-extent pop-ups only appear when someone decides to leave a page or website.
Since that person is already leaving, then you have nothing to lose when you throw a pop-up.
Use Engaging Multi-media Content
Images and videos are also known to boost a site’s engagement. That is precisely why Facebook posts that contain images are shared 2.3x more than those that haven’t.
Adding relevant, high-quality images will encourage users to fully engage with your content, entice them to learn more about your brand, and achieve healthy bounce rates.
Just keep in mind to add these visuals without hurting your website’s page load speed. Also, consider the type of file that you want to use so that it won’t hurt your site’s overall bounce rates.
Link to Related Posts and Articles
If you want to avoid users from bouncing out of your website, then consider linking your content to other pages on your site.
This is quite similar to internal linking. But with this approach, you’re featuring particular posts that your visitors would love to visit next.
For example, you can add related posts to the end of your blog post. This will give users something to do after they read your post.
Impress Visitors With Amazing Design
Another thing that will prompt people to leave your site is bad site design. This explains why we emphasize the importance of excellent web design to our clients at Sytian Productions.
Throw in amazing website design and your site visitors will not help it but stick like glue.
So, if your site design is just alright, then it is high time that you invest in a website redesign. Doing so will make your site stand out, and it can help reduce its bounce rate.
Over to You
There you have it. As you might have figured, there are several ways that can help you decrease the bounce rate of your site. Just keep in mind that every site is different.
You also have to consider your limitations, as well as your target audience, when figuring whether your bounce rate is too high.
Also, as your business develops, you will also begin to identify the specific pain points of your target audience. This will help you provide users with an experience that will keep them in your site much longer after initially clicking through from the search results.
When this happens, your bounce rates will drop, and the number of engaged users will skyrocket. So, which of these tips will you apply first on your site?
The authors
Learn more about us
THE BEHIND THE SCENES OF THIS BLOG
This article has been written and researched following a precise methodology.
Our methodology