Almost everyone who owns a website puts in a lot of effort for people to visit that website. Website owners try to get people to find their website and learn about their business by content marketing, PPC campaigns, and SEO efforts.
However, if the people who visit don’t stick around, that investment is not worth much. To understand if your website is doing its job, it’s important to understand bounce rate.
What Is a Bounce Rate?
In order to understand what a bounce rate is, we first need to look at the term bounce. The term bounce is the web session in which a person visits only one page on your website.
Therefore, a bounce rate is the sessions in which users visited only one page on your website, presented in a percentage.
A bounce rate is important because it lets you know that your website has issues with copywriting, page layout, user experience, or content. You will also be able to increase your conversion rate if you stop visitors from bouncing.
Lastly, bounce rates can be used as a Google Ranking factor.
What Are the Causes of High Bounce Rates?
1. Slow web pages
Even though in the past people were used to waiting for sites to load, now that most of the websites load extremely fast, people don’t have the patience to wait around. If your website takes a longer time to load, your users will bounce.
2. Autoplay videos and advert
People hate autoplay videos and adverts. In general, people feel like they see too many ads and in cases where they are bombarded by advertisements they are less likely to stay longer on the site.
3. Poor grammar
If your content has lots of grammar and spelling errors, people will have a hard time reading it and won’t stick around. Especially when there’s so much content on the same subject by competitors, why would users give themselves a hard time in trying to read yours?
4. Providing unrelated links
If users go to your website from a broken link that doesn’t work any longer, they’ll probably see a 404 page instead of your page. This happens if you did an overhaul of the site and changed some URLs or you moved to a new domain.
5. Non-skimmable content
Whether the content not being skimmable is due to the fact that the information provided isn’t helpful or there’s bad formatting, people are going to bounce if your content isn’t good.
6. Hard to read fonts
Have you ever left a website just because the fonts were hard to read or ugly? Bad fonts make people feel like they are better off to search the information somewhere else, somewhere they will have an easier time navigating.
What Are the Consequences of High Bounce Rates?
If users aren’t browsing your website, it means that you have a high bounce rate. Visitors are landing on your website and they leave without seeing your other pages.
The only exception when it is okay to have a high bounce rate is if your website is a single-page site.
A high bounce rate is definitely something you should be worried about if your site has multiple pages. To sum it up, a high bounce rate means that people aren’t exploring your website, which is bad for your website and business.
What Should You Do if Your Website Has a High Bounce Rate?
Connect your site to Google Search Console in order to see your bounce rate. Then, sign in to Google Analytics and review the bounce rate of every page on your site, going through them one by one.
In case you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website, make sure you install it and give it some time to gather the needed data. If you want to go through a simple procedure, you can instead install the MonsterInsights plugin, but keep in mind that this plugin works only for WordPress sites.
Tips for Reducing Your Website Bounce Rate
Improve the Website Speed
Your website needs to have beautiful design and awesome content, but there’s one thing that is essential, and that’s your website loading quickly. People nowadays are used to incredibly fast internet access and powerful computers and phones, which is why they expect that every site should work smoothly and quickly. How can you optimize your website to load faster?
Reducing image sizes
Eliminating unnecessary scripts
Deactivating plugins you don’t use
Enabling compression
Reducing redirects
Deferring JavaScript loading
Reducing image sizes
Eliminating unnecessary scripts
Deactivating plugins you don’t use
Enabling compression
Reducing redirects
Deferring JavaScript loading
To help you reduce high bounce rate, Verpex provides very fast web hosting, so make sure you check our website.
Use of High-Quality Images That Capture Attention
To make your content less visually intimidating, and to catch the attention of users, use suitable images that are high quality. By inserting images, the user will skim or scan your content more easily, since huge blocks of text can feel tiring. Putting an image between a few sentences can really help with readers not feeling overwhelmed by your content.
Make the Websites Highly Readable
Make sure that your content is highly readable, because if not, people won’t bother reading it.
Here are a few ways of making a website easy to read:
Section subheading – Break up your content into sections with subheaders
Lots of white spaces – Use lots of white space around your sentences to make it look more appealing to the eye
15-17px font – Don’t use smaller fonts since people won’t be able to read them on their phone
Skimmable paragraphs – Break your paragraphs into one or two sentence chunks.
Make The Websites Easy to Search
Even though an often afterthought of many sites is site search, it is a really important step. To reduce bounce rate, it is essential that you give your users tools so they can find anything they want to find. It can be really frustrating to try and search for a website and be presented with a “No results” or “Page not page” page, even though it’s something that should have lots of results. Users are more likely to stick around if they can find what they are looking for.
Use Videos to Engage the Users More
Videos are always a good idea to engage your users. The videos you upload on your website don’t necessarily have to be made by you, you can use other people’s videos and source them.
However, as we previously mentioned, don’t set the videos to play automatically. People can decide on their own if they want to see the video and play, you don’t need to annoy them and contribute to the bounce rate of your site.
Targeting Abandoning Users
Sometimes, even after doing everything right on your websites, some users still bounce. However, you need to make sure that you did everything in your power to fix problems like annoying ads, distracting pop-ups, bus that prevent the site from loading properly, and slow loading speed. If you can't figure out why people bounce after this, make sure you use a heat map, something we will talk about later in this article.
Increase Your Credibility with Branding and Social Proof
Instead of having a cheap looking website, you need to make sure that your website has high quality images, consistent branding, and custom-made graphics. Branding and credibility help reduce bounce rates since the users feel like they can trust you. rate. Here are a few tips to help in achieving better credibility and social proof:
Customer testimonials
Positive reviews by an acclaimed media site
Recommendation of your products/services in social media
Customer testimonials
Positive reviews by an acclaimed media site
Recommendation of your products/services in social media
You don’t need to have major names using your website, but a review from a satisfied customer can really improve your credibility.
Use of Heat Map Data to Improve Your Websites
A great way to see how people interact and use your site is through heat maps. This can be especially helpful if you’re trying to figure out why people are bouncing from your site.
There are lots of heatmap tools on the internet. Some that we like and are impressed with are Hotjar and CrazyEgg. But, no matter which one you decide to use, they all basically work the same way.
Add Internal Linking
As a way to reduce your bounce rate, many people advise that you include dozens of internal links in your content. Internal links will send people to other pages of your website, so it’s pretty logical that internal links will lower your bounce rate.
However, be careful to not include internal links in every other sentence, because it doesn’t offer your audience something of true value, it doesn’t enrich the experience they have on your website, and it looks plain awful.
Use of Table of Content With “Jump Links”
Long-form content is great to get social shares and links to your content. However, with long-form content people can get lost, and even bounce if they aren’t able to find what they are looking for quickly. This is why a table of contents is extremely useful. A table of contents will enable users to immediately find what they are looking for on a certain page.
Optimize Your Mobile UX
When browsing on their phones, users will look at your homepage and immediately leave if your website isn’t optimized for mobile. Make sure that your site looks and works smoothly on tablets and phones. Also, make sure that the site looks equally good on different mobile devices. Then, use the site from different mobile devices, to make sure that every button and link works.
Making Navigation on the Website Effortless
If you have a website that offers lots of content, it is crucial that your site is easy to navigate and has a clear menu that visitors can see. Make the navigation of your site as simple as possible, so it can be easily browsed through by users. If users have an easy way to find everything on your website, it increases the chance that they won’t bounce.
Summary
In this article, we went through some of the ways you can boost your conversion rate and reduce your bounce rate. The tips we offered in this article can produce quick results, but don’t immediately expect that. Stay consistent and keep growing your audience.
Verpex provides secure fast hosting solutions suitable for small businesses looking to reduce bounce rates by increasing the website speed, so make sure you check the offers on our website.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Is My Bounce Rate So High?
Some of the reasons for a high bounce rate include poor grammar, not-skimmable content, slow web pages, auto play videos and adverts, hard to read fonts, and unrelated links.
How Important Is Bounce Rate?
A bounce rate is important since it indicates if your webpage is confusing or irrelevant to the people who visit it.
What Are Acceptable Bounce Rates?
A good rule of thumb when it comes to bounce rate is that 26 to 40 percent is acceptable, even excellent.
Is Bounce Rate Ok for a Single Page?
Like we previously mentioned in an article, if you’re a single page website, having a higher bounce rate is acceptable. That’s not the case if you’re a website with several pages.
