Nevertheless, a high bounce rate can be unfavorable for your site’s score. It hints at more serious problems, primarily indicating that visitors are not receiving help from your website.
We have to address this now.
It is important to understand what makes a high bounce rate first before we proceed to ways to avoid it.
1. Your content isn’t good enough
Many users come to websites to learn about a specific topic. The audience will not spend time on your content if it does not meet these needs. Nonprofit organizations, for example, attract individuals by satisfying their need to give.
They may visit Google to search for well-written articles similar to yours and may prefer to invest time in such sites.
That has an impact because it is easy to create good content, but that impact is a loss for you.
First, it is useful to adopt a framework of analysis focused on the audience. Knowing what mechanisms a person will use when deciding to visit your site instead of your competitor is necessary. Even the most eminent minds in marketing would endorse the same.
Observe how they come up with the list of the best marketing books in this post; with images & prices, they include even minor details of each book.
Considering the above example, merely conceptualizing content that will draw people to your site will not be enough. You must work on highly informative and engaging content that caters to visitors‘ needs.
To influence them towards getting conversions, the content must answer their questions and offer some level of clarity and solutions to the problem. What sort of website you’re operating is completely irrelevant – be it a blog, online store, or something else. Besides, what they need to look for must be easy to search—do not generate excessive material or write bad content. While it is important for your website to make an impact, too much of everything, along with distractive graphics, equals low sticking rates.
Content is how a particular firm communicates with its targeted audience by delivering what it requires to help it make improved decisions.
2. Your Website has a Poor User Experience
Therefore, usability is a litmus test for whether people wish to continue engaging with the site. It can be significantly enhanced on a website by creating an interactive paradigm where the website visitor can try to select product functions suitable for him.
While your website offers an overview of many features and can always meet the needs of many readers, everyone will immediately see what they are looking for, even if they start from the top of the page and scroll to the bottom.
However, general information about the product should be added to make it appear professional and not strictly a sales pitch.
Above is Amerisleep’s landing page; apart from its primary goal of presenting products, it also minimizes distances between itself and customers by responding to some questions that any buyer can think about when they plan to purchase a mattress, including, but not limited to, the prices of a king mattress, the low-end and high-end price, and the size of the king-size mattress, etc.
However, if you organize your navigation poorly, it will be negative, and people will not hesitate to leave the site without understanding where to look for something. Humans are naturally very lazy regarding chores and tasks that do not require effort.
But when comparing your site’s achievements to ordinary ones, you must understand that it will not pass or may pass with many unnecessary components.
A clean, minimalist design will enhance customers’ ability to quickly skim the page before placing an order.
Imagine you really need some particular information, but you are given a site with too many unnecessary pictures, extra windows, additional slides, and other such things.
What you get as a result of these features are all elements that are crying for attention rather than those that contribute value. How often will you turn around there to look for the particular information you need?
The notion that a lean UX is enough to retain visitors’ interest and make them eager to know more should be chosen.
2. Your Website has a Poor User Experience
Usability, therefore, features as a litmus test on whether people wish to continue engaging the site or not. It can be significantly enhanced on a website by creating an interactive paradigm where the website visitor can try to select product functions suitable for him.
While your website offers an overview of many features and can always meet the needs of many readers, everyone will immediately see what they are looking for, even if they start from the top of the page and scroll to the bottom.
However, general information about the product should be added to make it appear professional and not strictly a sales pitch.
Above is Amerisleep’s landing page; apart from its primary goal of presenting products, it also minimizes distances between itself and customers by responding to some questions that any buyer can think about when they plan to purchase a mattress, including, but not limited to, the prices of a king mattress, the low-end and high-end price, and the size of the king-size mattress, etc.
However, if you organize your navigation poorly, it will be negative, and people will not hesitate to leave the site without understanding where to look for something. Humans are naturally very lazy regarding chores and tasks that do not require effort.
But when comparing your site’s achievements to ordinary ones, you must understand that it will not pass or may pass with many unnecessary components.
A clean, minimalist design will enhance customers’ ability to quickly skim the page before placing an order.
Imagine you really need some particular information, but you are given a site with too many unnecessary pictures, extra windows, additional slides, and other such things.
What you get as a result of these features are all elements that are crying for attention rather than those that contribute value. How often will you turn around there to look for the particular information you need?
The notion that a lean UX is enough to retain visitors’ interest and make them eager to know more should be chosen.
3. Technical Errors on Your Site
High bounce rates—While high bounce rates sometimes signal a problematic and uninteresting page or post, they can also indicate a technical hitch. For example, a wrong CDN setup can deter most internet users from visiting our web page. This can lead to several difficulties or issues, as outlined below.
When users attempt to open content on the site with a misconfigured CDN, they get a captcha page or something like that. Unfortunately, I could not get the captcha to work and automatically enter the correct string even when repeating the input several times. It is also worth mentioning that an incorrectly configured CDN can potentially serve a request that contains a geo-failure for a certain geography to the visitor.
It’s the same; shenanigans can occur if Javascript is not well integrated into a page or some random plugin does not work. In a way, this can help avoid a situation where a form is loaded with the rest of the page becoming interactable.
This results in high bounce rates—to be precise, 92% higher than normal bounce rates on average throughout the year.
Given the above findings, how can the problem be addressed or solved? If a page has a high bounce rate, the first thing to do is to visit it as any visitor would.
Think of what a regular visitor to your site would do:
- Look at the design
- Read the content
- Click on different elements
- It is always good to try leaving the page
Is there any related error or problem when it comes to any content that is located on the page?
In addition, there is the question of whether your site can offer a secure connection for browsing; this could discourage many visitors. Doing this will harm trust, just like the other mistakes we have discussed above.
When you have looked into these issues, it helps you decide what the next step is. If it is a CDN problem, then rewiring it would solve most of the problems because it is not a very complex system.
4. Speed Issues on Your Site
Your website should load in less time than possible. Its ability to load fast indicates that it is well-optimized. If it is taking this long to load in its entirety, chances are you will lose your visitors within a few seconds. People are impatient.
With Pingdom or GTMetrics, you’ll quickly know what slow or broken is causing bottlenecks. These tools offer you a report of where the site speed is and what needs to be done to rectify the problem.
It does not matter if you can reduce your website’s loading time by one second; it will translate to better traffic, fewer bounce rates, and higher conversions.
How to Reduce a High Bounce Rate
This means that the largest first step in measuring or evaluating your site’s bounce rate involves doing it properly.
If you are experiencing high bounce rates and would prefer them to be low, the following are some things you can do.
1. Choose a Page With a Particularly Bad Bounce Rate
However, individual pages on the given website should show that a small percentage of overall traffic has high bounce rates, regardless of the overall high bounce rates observed. So, the first thing is identifying the pages containing those results. Then, move around within the page as any other user of the website would do and jot down some notes.
These include analyzing vital statistics on the page. One might consider how much time individuals spend at and around it. Now, what do you think they are obtaining? What are they searching for?
Determine whether creating a good design and structure, along with the right navigation and arrangement of the contents on that page, helps people meet their intended goals.
2. Install a Recording Tool to Watch How People are Navigating
Accessibility concerns how users navigate the site. For instance, a tool known as Hotjar records and allows you to view how a person uses the website.
Other than this, it also lets you see where people are clicking with their mouse pointers, which buttons they are clicking, and whether they are near a certain conversion.
You could progress the site recordings since they underscore regions you can enhance. This is good enough for any page with a high bounce rate, provided the design and copy are appropriate.
When you have used a recording tool, check the page with the highest bounce rates. This will help you determine what the user does before they bounce.
3. Run a Heatmap to Understand More About the User Behavior
The heatmap tool provides more detailed results by showing how your visitors navigate your site. You get the full picture—fast movements through or in and out of landing pages clicks on and off the CTAs, etc.
For example, in this post below about startup marketing budget, it seems that while designing websites, the creators noticed that the TOP RIGHT CORNER and BOTTOM RIGHT CORNER get the most clicks. The positions were agreed to be placed in those areas of the site with the Call-to-action buttons.
4. Run A/B Tests
When you would like to understand where the perception side of the story comes from or you would like to understand the spanning elements that are gaining more traffic, you would like to make several changes in the middle of the pages.
We must admit that recordings and heatmaps can be very useful in reducing bounce rates. You can even use A/B testing for the headlines, call-to-action buttons, images, and other elements on the web page.
Many things can help boost the landing page conversion rates, but one of them is using videos, such as testimonial videos.
desk, for instance, employs several examples of different types of testimonials. Mailchimp uses single testimonials.
This is done by recreating the same page with slight differences intentionally made between the two versions for an A/B test. You compare the same page with the image or the call to action button in a color that changes between the two to establish which is ideal for converting the mere traffic into the required leads.
However, in addition to A/B testing, you may also want to employ multivariate testing, in which more than one element is used to determine which has displayed better performance.
This testing allows you to determine the right elements, their colors, and the right words to convey this message.
Though there are several general methodologies you can try to reduce the bounce rate:
- Segment bounce rate by landing/entry page: This means that your site’s bounce rate does not show the real problem, as we do not see the relative bounces. This is because you need some special information about bounce rates on each page.
- Most visited landing pages: Based on web analytics, it is possible to identify the top 20 landing pages. Then observe their bounce rates as well.
- They should be the pages or categories that you can optimize to reach maximum bounce rates within your site.
- Surveys: There are many alternatives to poll the visitors who get a pop-up if they click the x at the top. Dealing with the third option, there is always a chance to aggravate the visitor, but there can be various valuable information, too.
- Testing: It allows you to try out a range of layouts, styles, and call-to-action buttons while also allowing you a range of trial-and-error when creating content.
Last but not least, a user should reread it to learn if optimizations affect it and lower a site’s bounce rate.
5. Use High-Quality Images to Captivate User Attention
High-quality images are some of the most effective tools for grabbing people’s attention and helping to ensure that they will stick around for longer, thus reducing the bounce rate.
People today strive to post good photos on their blogs and bulletin boards and even create their own photos just for the sake of having good-looking online blogs and websites.
For instance, on this page on employee coaching templates, they use many images to their templates to engage the reader and make him feel like he would be getting a sneak peek of what the article contains.
Once you sign up for stock photography sites, you will be provided with a set of professional photos to work with. The modern trend option is the best, as it looks much more professional than the standard images provided.
6. Optimize for Relevance
Page loading times – that is, how long it takes to download the HTML code and other page components – must be considered. However, you must consider the formatting guidelines before copying the content. It is with credibility that one of the most significant causes of high bounce rate is the irrelevance of the content that is displayed on the web page.
From the feedback received via the Website feedback post, it is clear that one can gather feedback using CSAT scores, NPS scores, or Exit surveys and then make the necessary adjustments to the site based on that feedback.
Due to the fact that sites can only generate content that is most relevant to specific keywords, only a few sites can generate MATR content. Forget the habit of creating something that is related to the intended keywords in some way, no, get creative and make something super relevant. Keep relevance as the top priority, even above other factors like accessibility.