Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that come to your website and then leave after only viewing a single page. There can be several reasons for this, such as the user-friendliness of the page, or even something as trivial as the page loading time.
This blog aims to help you prevent you making the mistakes that lead to a large bounce rate – so let’s get into it…
Make your website mobile-friendly
The number of users accessing the web primarily from their mobile phones is increasing dramatically every year. Therefore, optimising your website for mobile usage is critical to reducing bounce rate. Clearly, if a user is trying to access your site from their mobile and it isn’t compatible, then that visitor will bounce rather quickly.
Yes, making your website mobile-friendly is not simple and can add another expense to your business, however you cannot underestimate the importance of it. Remember, you can make your site look as pretty as can be, but if the page takes over a minute to load, you can wave goodbye to that visitor.
Cut down that loading time
47% of people expect a web page to load in around 2 seconds. This means it’s crucial to not only worry about content, but the speed of your site to stop visitors from bouncing. Radware ran out a study and found that a speed delay of just 500 milliseconds can result in a 26% increase in a visitor’s frustration and an 8% decrease in engagement.
Therefore, even if increasing the loading time of pages sounds very trivial and unimportant, it should be high up on the priority list as in this technological age, everybody wants results instantly, and if your website doesn’t provide that then you should expect an increase in bounce rate.
Design your website so it is effortless to use
The visitors of your page are there for a reason – they don’t want to be working for the information they want or else they will simply leave and visit another site. This means that your site needs to be simply effortless to navigate and users should feel like they understand where everything is as, essentially, they are the ones in control.
A way to improve on this is by getting an objective observer to check it out for the first time. They should be able to let you know the pros and cons, which in turn may give you an idea of how to improve content and navigational links etc. Another good way of understanding how consumers use your website is by using heat maps. They show exactly where your visitors click and how quickly they found what they wanted. If you do this and try to improve your site, then you should see an improvement in your bounce rate.
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