6 Reasons Why Your Bounce Rate Goes Through The Roof

Do you know what’s the one thing that Internet users lack the most?

Patience.

There are a few metrics that can help you understand if a user lost their patience because you didn’t give them the experience they were looking for.

Bounce rate is SOMETIMES one of those metrics.

I consider bounce rate to be kind of the website-equivalent vanity metric to likes on social media.

We just can’t stop obsessing over it, although many of us know how vague a metric it actually is.

Yes, bounce rate does supposedly give you some info as to what pages cause users to not navigate around your site, sticking only to 1 page per session and then leaving.

Although again, it doesn’t tell you that much, because what if the user found what they were looking for and then just left or completed any other conversion that you wanted them to in a single-page session?

In other words, bounce rate by itself doesn’t give you the full picture. It’s only in combination with other metrics, such as exit rate, time on page, scroll tracking or event tracking (where applicable) for example, that you can get a better grasp of the situation.

For the sake of this article though, I’m going to list the most common factors that cause people to bounce away from your site after viewing just 1 page.

Fortunately, most of them have to do with just seeing things from a user’s perspective, so they’re not that complicated to fix.

1. Slow loading time

An image is a thousand words and we know you need your images for conversions and to avoid making a page text-heavy. Here’s the hard truth though.

Your images are probably causing your site to load slower than the time a pregnant turtle needs to take a single step. Slow loading times due to big size photos are one of the most common reasons why users will bounce away.

Opting for a cheap server or using custom fonts (as nice as they might seem) doesn’t help either. And then, there’s also the technical part that has to do with the code on your site. The less scripts you have in your code (like for example the Analytics tag or similiar tags from other tools) the better.

A lot of those will cause your site to load slower than usual. There really is no excuse to not fix all of that. Tools like Google Page Speed or GT Metrix will give you a heads up on all the issues that are causing your site to load slow, as well as what improvements you can do to fix those. Heck, they will even compress your images for you!

2. Boring intro

There’s no point in delivering great content, if you can’t hook the readers from the very beginning. A bad intro is a job half done and will get your bounce rate through the roof.

There’s a ton of content on the Internet on every single subject. Why should the user keep reading YOUR content instead of somebody else’s after they landed on your site? That’s what you have to let them know from the very beginning.

Common mistakes in intros are not summarizing what the page is about, or making the intro too generic. Also, if you’re creating content for local markets you have to let the user know that the page is specific to, say “best restaurants in New York” by mentioning the specific characteristics of that area.

The concept here is to make it as clear as possible that your content is hyper-specific as well as interesting. Short and sweet is what you should be going for.

3. Hard to scan content

“Yes, I love pages with no white space, no headings, no bold text, and 10-line paragraphs”, said only one schizophrenic user in the entire history of the Internet, and no other.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, users lack patience. After checking out if your intro is interesting enough, they will scan the page to find the main points of your content.

What, you haven’t broken down the page with headings? Big no no! Huge chunks of text are not welcomed by users, especially mobile ones. Imagine scrolling through a page with long paragraphs and no headings on your 320X240 screen size iPhone 5? I’d rather eat rotten cheese instead!

Also, not every user is interested to read a whole article from the beginning. Some of them are just looking for something in particular, so the least you can do is to form the page in a way that helps them find it.

Have something you don’t want the reader to miss? Put it in bold. Follow a logical structure in the break down of your text with H2s, H3s and H4s to help the reader follow the flow of your content.

Absence of sufficient white space can also be very discouraging for users, in combination with all of the above, making them bounce away from your site.

4. Not satisfying search intent

Search intent has to do with the reason users conduct a specific search and what they were trying to achieve with it. When people use keywords like “buy”, “sale”, “discount”, or “review” they’re much closer to purchasing something compared to when they perform “How to” queries, which are more informational.

So, just consider this scenario. A user is trying to find information on how to nail a frame on the wall (although I don’t know why somebody would do such a search), and they come across an article that provides an extremely short and incomplete answer to the question. Was the searcher’s intent satisfied? No.

They probably just hit the “back” button on their browser and went to the next result to find an answer. If one thing’s for sure, that’s users will not go through the trouble of navigating your site further to MAYBE manage to find what they were looking for.

Hitting that “back” button seems to be the easiest and most common solution to unsatisfied search intent.

5. A gazillion ads & annoying pop-ups

If you’re set on delivering a bad user experience, go ahead and use pop-ups. Want to take it a step further on the annoyance meter? Fire them on mobile too and make it impossible for your users to navigate around the page. Ads & pop-ups are completely anti-user friendly.

I understand that there are sites that have to follow such practices to make money, but there are certain limits even to that. Crossing those will definitely make users leave your site after a single-page session. My way of thinking is “Don’t do what you don’t like seeing as a user yourself”. Thinking that different users think differently will get you nowhere, and ALL USERS HATE ADS & POP-UPS.

6. Bad mobile experience

If one thing’s for sure, it’s that you should be designing your site or blog thinking mobile-first, or in other words, offering mobile users the best experience possible for their respective device. Consider mobile as your priority, not desktop.

In my line of work, I come across many sites on a daily basis and I cannot stress enough how many of them look like crap on mobile. If you don’t already have a responsive website, I don’t know why you actually bother being in the Internet business.

There’s no worse thing than having people trying to zoom in on their mobile to read something or view the photo of a product. It’s just pure bad user experience. There’s a pretty simple and quick fix to that.

Just go to your Analytics and see what percentage of users come through to your site via a mobile device. Then, go check out what screen resolutions their devices have and make sure that your site looks good on those devices. Right click on the page you want to optimize for mobile, choose “Inspect” and then select one of the suggested devices or screen sizes from the top menu and see how it looks.

What aspects of a website do you personally think contribute to bounce rate increase? I’d love to know, so hit me up in the comments below.

I’d also appreciate one or many 👏 so that this article can reach other people too.

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