How to resolve a high bounce rate

Bounce rates determines the percentage of website visitors that leave your website without having explore any other website pages, typically, an average content website is going to have anywhere from 70% to 90% bounce rate, this is largely due to the fact that content websites are visited by the kind of visitors who only seek a particular article for their needs. But, room for improvement is always there, and a few slight modifications can drastically increase the amount of pages that each individual visitor visitors on your website.

We will explore in this post as to how we can prevent high bounce rates, and what kind of precautions we should take into account when structuring a websites page.

Bounce rate is determined through many different factors: whenever a user clicks on an external link on your page and leaves your website, whenever users click the Back button to return to the page they came from, directly closing your website page, changing the website’s URL, or simply timing out.

Here we come back to the original idea, a high bounce rate is going to be particularly bad for situations where the web page is meant to lead towards a conversion, whereas content pages usually serve only one purpose; content. If you have high-traffic pages like homepage with a big bounce rate, it’s time to reconsider your strategy and reassess properly.

Step 1: Analyze traffic sources

The first indication of a high bounce rate is that your traffic quality might be lacking the extra juice that it needs, and this is particularly bad for situations where a marketing campaign is used to generate traffic. Free website tools such as Google Analytics allow anyone to tap into the traffic sources for all website pages, and see where there might be potential leaks. The best thing to do, is to eliminate any possible traffic leaks and work on gaining higher quality traffic from reputable websites. You want the visitors who come to your website with the intention of gaining something from it, not just visiting because it crossed their browsing path.

Step 2: Establish an outline

Your traffic quality might not be a problem after all, and that is good news in itself, but you might still be wondering what is going on with these high bounce rates. The next thing to analyze is the outline that you are proposing on your landing pages. Is your proposition clearly communicated, and do new visitors can clearly understand the purpose of each individual page.

The outline needs to be effective towards giving the visitor a broader understanding of your business, or service, and make them more interested in understanding your offers on the table. Simple and passionless statements about your mission aren’t going to capture attention like it should.

Step 3: Website performance

Slow loading pages are a huge factor towards bounce rate. Website visitors can quickly get impatient with pages that haven’t fully loaded, and will simply close the window. WordPress users have some of the best tools and practices allocated to them to make their WordPress sites much faster, and naturally this leads to a reduction in bounce rates. A good example is caching plugins that can cache a single content page in HTML format, and serve that same copy to everyone else, without the interference of database queries.

Learning how to minify your JS and CSS, enabling caching plugins, reducing image sizes through compression, enabling a solid mobile-friendly design, all of these factors come into play when designing for website performance.

Step 4: Website design

Much like performance, website design can also play a big role in the percentage of bounce rates that your website is going to receive. If we look at modern web design, majority of internet users have already adapted to very high-standards of web design, so when they encounter a website that has poor design, or lacks in functionality, they will naturally question the reliability of this website, which could be yours. Your job is to make sure that your design is up to date with modern standards, and offers your visitors a pleasant experience where they can navigate from one page to another, seamlessly.

Step 5: Clear and actionable elements

To reduce bounce rate, your visitors need to complete website actions, for businesses — this will usually come down to actionable Call-to-Action buttons that invoke a particular response from the visitor. This could be an email signup form, a pricing module button, anything that would make the user to switch pages and continue down the on-boarding process. The clearer the CTA elements, the more likely that visitors will want to explore them.

Author Bio: Alex Ivanovs has worked with small businesses and digital marketing companies for the past ten years, structuring and building marketing strategies that help businesses achieve optimal return for their investment. Alex is currently working as a Managing Editor at Colorlib.