Top 4 Reasons Of High Bounce Rate And How To Decrease It?
When most people make the decision to start an online business, their minds automatically jump to experiencing the success of it all… the flexible schedule, being your own boss, and, of course, making lots of money! Once they come back to reality, they realize the hard work involved before actually bracing success.
A lot goes into starting your online business. The process begins with planning and market research and decision about how to build and sustain your website. But if you are not a tech savvy, the website builders make this step easier given their easy to use for beginners and expert features that run you through all the step in how to make a website.
Upon building your site, you’re ready to open for business! After all the hard work you’ve put in, you finally start to see the traffic coming in! But what if you get the leads and no one actually buy anything? In fact, it might seem as though visitors enter your site, and leave soon without any substantial activity.
Why are People Leaving Your Site?
Well, the reason people leave sites can vary but it is indeed a sign that you need to figure out what’s going on.
When people come to your site and then leave, it’s usually perceived as a bad thing but that’s not always the case. For instance, someone might visit your site looking for your business contact. That would still be considered a conversion. Where the problem lies is when a visitor comes to your site, leaves, and doesn’t convert.
So how do you find out what’s making visitors to your site leave? Well, it will definitely involve some calculations with the help of Google Analytics to track your single page views. But let’s focus on what you’re doing on your end to cause people to leave your site.
If your website has any of these factors or qualities, it could be a major reason why your site has such a high bounce rate.
Common Causes of High Bounce Rates
Your Site Has Bad or Useless Content
If you think about it, people usually land on pages because they’ve conducted a search query on a particular topic. Once they land on that page and aren’t able to get any use of the content, they’re not going to stick around to see if they can find better content on that site. They’re going to go back to the search results page and click on another site for better content.
To prevent this from happening, you want to always make sure to have engaging content on your site. Do your best to understand your audience to provide them with content that answers questions and mitigates any concerns related to your niche. This will help get conversions for sure.
Your Site Takes Too Long to Load
Customers are not likely to stay on any site that takes too long to load. According to dotcom-tools.com, the ideal website load time is anywhere between two to five seconds but if you don’t want visitors to leave your site, your pages need to load in two seconds or less. 1.3 seconds is actually the maximum page load time that industry leaders suggest as the loading benchmark.
That applies to desktop and mobile versions of your site. Google conducted research and revealed some interesting information on page load times in relation to bounce rate probabilities:
- 1–3 second page load time: probability of bounce increases 32%
- 1–5 second page load time: probability of bounce increases 90%
- 1–6 second page load time: probability of bounce increases 106%
- 1–10 second page load time: probability of bounce increases 123%
There’s no way to avoid bounce rates altogether but to optimize your site, you will have to make sure the page loading time is under 1–3 seconds.
Your Site isn’t Mobile-Friendly
Making your website mobile-friendly is a no-brainer to all website owners but you’d be surprised at how this “no-brainer” isn’t practiced as often as it should. A 2018 study revealed that nearly a quarter of some of the biggest websites and brands didn’t have mobile-friendly websites.
When websites are not optimized for mobile devices, they tend to look terrible, plus they won’t load fast either, and these are good reasons why your site will have an increasing bounce rate. When a visitor tries to access your site on a mobile device, and it isn’t optimized for mobile, the page loses some design principles, the format is off, and the information appears distorted.
When this happens, users will typically go back to the search engine and go to a competitor site that is mobile-friendly.
Overall Poor UX
As a business owner, you want visitors to your site to have a good experience that drives them to make a purchase. But a lot of times, business owners want this so bad that they actually do the complete opposite and create a bad user experience for their visitors.
In your efforts to get people to buy, you might bombard them with pop-up ads and email subscription boxes. This tactic is clearly “in your face” for visitors and can make them leave within a few seconds of entering your site. Those pop-up ads are just like hungry sales people that pounce on you as soon as you walk into a physical store asking if they can help you with anything!
Also, if your site is too confusing or difficult to navigate, they’ll leave for that reason as well. For example, if your site has a blog but no search tool, a visitor will have a hard time navigating your site to find what they’re looking for. And they’re definitely not going to look through countless pages and posts to find that.
Summing up!
Having an online business is more than just launching a site. You need to make sure every bit of it adds value to customer experience to ensure a minimum bounce rate.
Give your visitors what they want without the hard sell as soon as they enter your site. They should have an overall pleasant experience on your site which will prompt them to come back and visit.
If this article was helpful, check other useful posts here:
- Your guide to creating Adwords ads
- Best ways to boost your website domain authority
- Understand the basics of product differentiation
Comment below to let me know what other topics you want me to cover in the next articles.
