Decreasing Your Website’s Bounce Rate to Increase Site Performance
A website’s bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who come to a site and then leave without viewing any other pages on the site. In general, a low Bounce Rate indicates that your website is performing well, while a high Bounce Rate suggests that there may be a problem with the design, usability, SEO/content, or functionality of your website.
A website’s bounce rate can be viewed using web analytics software and occasionally through reports generated by the web server or content management system.
Decreasing a website’s bounce rate can be done in a variety of ways, from search engine optimisation to simply making your content interesting and relevant. If readers are able to get what they came for quickly, then they are more likely to explore other areas of the site before leaving.
How to Decrease Your Website’s Bounce Rate
- Improve your site navigation and internal linking. If a reader feels lost or has trouble finding what he or she is looking for, then your bounce rate will increase. Use text links when appropriate and make sure to have clear, concise labels on your navigation elements.
- Make sure that you have a distinct page title and heading tags for each page. Titles and headings help search engines understand what your page is about. Titles should be descriptive, concise, and engaging to the reader.
- Make your site content as relevant and valuable as possible. Make sure that each webpage is about something, whether it be a specific topic or a single idea. Content that is highly relevant to its webpage will be valued more by your visitors, whereas content that seems out of place will cause a bounce.
- Consider your site design and how it impacts user experience. Use aesthetically pleasing images that are relevant to the website’s subject matter, make sure that links stand out from non-interactive elements on the page, use clear typography, etc. These factors will all affect how quickly or slowly users leave your website upon landing on your page.
- If you have advertisements, make sure that they are relevant to the content of the webpage and that users will find them useful. Ads that mislead or frustrate readers can cause a bounce rate by forcing people off of your website quickly.
- Don’t force social sharing tools if they don’t seem relevant to the site’s content. Using them will increase your bounce rate by forcing users to make a choice about social sharing before they even know if they like your website or not.
- Make sure that you have a way for people to contact you and let visitors know how often you update your website. If people are unable to contact you or do not know what your site’s frequency of updates is, then they are likely to leave quickly.
- Conduct user testing in order to learn more about your website’s design and how it impacts user experience. If you provide the test subjects with a task list before beginning, you will be able to better understand how your site’s design or content impedes their time to complete the list.
In the end, every website owner should aim for a low bounce rate. While there are many factors that affect this metric, the main thing is that you want users to stay on your site for as long as possible and enjoy what they are doing. By following these steps, you can decrease your website’s bounce rate and see a rise in user interaction.
Contact us if you like us to run a health check on your website.
