A high bounce rate can be detrimental to the success of your site. A high bounce rate often indicates larger issues, primarily because visitors do not find your site useful.
It's time to fix this.
Let's start by understanding what causes a high bounce rate.
1. Your content is not good enough
People visit websites to learn more about a topic. People won't stick around for long if your content doesn't meet these needs.
They may turn to Google to find better-written competitive content and prefer those sites to yours.
That's a significant loss for you because creating good content is an easy fix.
Start by first developing an understanding of your audience. country email list It's important to understand why someone should choose your site over a competitor's site. Marketing gurus would give you the same advice.
Notice how they organize the best marketing books in this post with their images and detailed pricing information for each book.
With the above example in mind, you need to create highly engaging content that addresses the unique needs of your site visitors.
To get conversions, your content needs to answer their questions, offer clarity, and provide a solution to their problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re running an online store , a blog, or anything else. Plus, what they need to find should be easy to discover — don’t post a lot of irrelevant or poorly written content. If your website turns people off with a lot of clutter, it means your stickiness rates are low.
Content is how you speak to your audience, giving them what they need to make better decisions.
2. Your website has a poor user experience
User experience decides whether people want to stay on the site or leave it. It can be greatly optimized on a website by designing it with interactive features so that visitors can filter the product features that best suit them. Even though your website covers many features to satisfy a wide range of readers, everyone can easily find the information they are looking for without having to scroll up and down.
Also, include general information about the product to make the website more objective and less focused solely on marketing the product.
Image Source
Above is the homepage of Amerisleep; in addition to their main goal, which is to introduce their products, they add a small section that brings them closer to the audience by answering some frequently asked questions that a customer would normally ask themselves when deciding to buy a mattress, such as “How much do king mattresses cost?” “Do they usually cost?” “What is the low-end and high-end price range?” or “What size is a king mattress?”
However, if your navigation isn't easy to understand, it will backfire and visitors won't stick around to figure things out. As humans, we have a special kind of laziness toward things that don't necessarily need to be done.
For a significantly superior user experience, you should not overload your page with too many irrelevant elements.
Have a simple layout and design with scannable content to improve conversions.
Think of it this way: you're looking for specific information, but instead you get a site with too many irrelevant images, pop-ups , slide-ins, and more.
All of these elements demand attention rather than adding value. How long will you sit there trying to discover the information you want?
Choose a simple UX that keeps visitors happy and eager to learn more.
3. Technical errors on your site
If your bounce rates are high, this can sometimes indicate a technical error. For example, a poorly configured CDN can prevent many visitors from accessing your site. This can result in several issues.
One of the common errors I've seen with a misconfigured CDN is getting a captcha page when trying to access the site's content. The captcha is not resolved even after several correct entries. A misconfigured CDN can unintentionally block the site for visitors from a certain geography.
If Javascript isn't working properly on a page or if some random plugin isn't working, that can also cause similar problems. It can prevent a form from loading and the entire page can become inaccessible.
This results in an unusually high bounce rate.
How to fix the problem? If a page's bounce rate is high, the first step is to try visiting the page as any other visitor would.
Think about what a regular visitor to your site would do:
look at the design
Read the content
Click on different elements
Try to leave the page.
Are there errors or problems when accessing any content on the page?
Additionally, if your site is unable to provide a secure connection , this could deter a significant proportion of visitors. This will hamper trust as much as any of the other errors we've mentioned.
Once you've studied these issues, you'll be able to determine what to do next. If it's a CDN issue, reconfiguring it would make most of the problems go away.
4. Speed issues on your site
Your website should load quickly. You risk having your visitor leave your site if it takes more than a few seconds to fully load. People are impatient.
Use Pingdom or GTMetrics to quickly identify the cause of your bottlenecks. These tools send you a report on your site's speed and suggestions for fixing the problem.
Even if you can improve page load times by just one second, it will result in better traffic, better bounce rates, and more conversions.
How to reduce a high bounce rate
When evaluating your site's bounce rate, the most important first step is to do so systematically.
Here are six steps you should take if your bounce rates are suffering and you want to keep them as low as possible.
1. Choose a page with a particularly bad bounce rate
Even if the website has a high bounce rate everywhere, there should still be pages where a few pages have particularly high bounce rates. So the first thing is to find out those pages. Then browse the page like any other visitor would and take notes.
Study important page metrics. Look at how much time people spend on it. Are they getting what they're looking for?
Look at the layout, navigation, and content structure of the page and see if that helps people achieve their goals.
