You spend a lot of money on your business website intending to grow your business and increase your revenue. After a few months, you find that your website is not performing well even after trying everything possible. This is one of the most common issues faced by almost every individual who starts a website. Website performance is based on various factors, and the bounce rate is one of them. If it is high, your website performance will suffer. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to keep your bounce rate low. In this article, we will discuss the most possible reasons for a high bounce rate on your website. We will also learn how to reduce the bounce rate so that you can increase your conversion rate.
In the previous article, we have already discussed what the bounce rate is. We have also learned how to check the bounce rate in Google Analytics. Having a high bounce rate is not a good sign. It will impact your business website negatively. So make sure the bounce rate of your website is low, i.e. between 26% to 55%. Google does not like websites with a high bounce rate. It never shows them in the top search results. If you have a high bounce rate, you have to reduce it. Before discussing how to reduce the bounce rate, we should get familiar with the reasons that cause a high bounce rate.
Reasons for a High Bounce Rate
There are various reasons for a high bounce rate –
- One of the most common reasons for a high bounce rate is website slowness. If your website is taking too much time to load, this will impact the user experience negatively. Users never like slow websites. You just have a few seconds to grab their attention. If you fail to do so, neither they will stay on your website for long nor will they ever visit your site again.
- The bounce rate of your website also depends on its appearance and the web interface. If your website’s design is not attractive, it will fail to capture your visitor’s attention. And if your website is difficult to navigate or the navigation is messy, your visitors cannot navigate between the web pages. As a result, they will instantly bounce back to another website.
- If your website has low-quality content, this will also increase your bounce rate. Web content with less readability fails to engage visitors. Moreover, if your web content is poorly written or fails to deliver the message accurately, your visitors will move to other websites to find the right information.
- Websites with no mobile version have a higher bounce rate compared to mobile-friendly websites. If you do not optimize your website for mobile, it will not look good on mobile devices. These days people are now more active on smartphones. Instead of laptops, they use their smartphones to access the internet. So if a mobile user visits your website, s/he will not like it because your website is not optimized for mobile devices. In that case, the user will bounce back and find a better option.
Besides these, there could be various reasons for a high bounce rate.
How to Reduce the Bounce Rate?
If your visitors are not satisfied with your website, they will not stay there for long and bounce back to other websites. This will increase the bounce rate of your website. If visitors come to your website, you have to keep them engaged so that they can spend their time on your website. You have to encourage visitors to continue with your website. Now the question is – how to reduce the bounce rate of your website.
Below are the top 5 proven tips that will not only reduce the bounce rate but also increase your conversion rate.
#1 – Speed Up Your Website
Good user experience is very important to hold visitors’ attention and keep them engaged on the site. So if your WordPress website has a high bounce rate, this means you need to work on its user experience. To improve the user experience, you have to speed up your website. Users often leave a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. A quick page loading is important to your site loyalty. If your website loads quickly, it will give a pleasant experience to your visitors. They will visit your website more frequently.
#2 – Improve Your Web Design
Your web design is perhaps the most important thing that determines whether your website will perform well or not. Make sure your website looks great, and it is easy-to-navigate. With a beautiful website, you will not only grab visitors’ attention but also keep them engaged. You need to use a simple and clean layout for your website so that your visitors can easily navigate through your web pages. If you have a beautiful and easy-to-navigate website, your visitors will like it and spend their time on it. The more time they spend on your site, the less would be your bounce rate. Refer to this article for some useful information – Top 10 Web Design Tips.
#3 – Improve Your Content Quality
High-quality web content gives visitors a good user experience. If your website contains unique and high-quality content, your visitors will enjoy it and stick around your website. To improve your web content quality, you have to increase its readability. Keep your target audience in mind while creating your web content. Make sure your web content is –
- High-quality
- Engaging
- Credible
- Useful and informative
- More valuable and useful than other websites
#4 – Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Today around 80% of internet users use their smartphones to search for information online. And they like mobile-friendly websites because such websites are optimized for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. If your business website is not mobile-friendly yet, you should make it today. This will help mobile users access your website and keep them engaged around it.
#5 – Embed YouTube Videos
Using multimedia objects like images and infographics can also help you grab your visitors’ attention. But make sure they are not oversized because oversized objects can make your web page heavy and affect the page speed. If you would like to add videos, use YouTube videos. Instead of uploading videos, you can simply embed a YouTube video.
Conclusion
The objective of this article is to help you get familiar with the most commons reasons for a high bounce rate. In this article, we learned how to reduce the bounce rate of your website without taking the help of any professional. The tips shared above are very easy and highly effective. By using them, you will be able to reduce the bounce rate of your website and increase your conversion rate.
