How To Reduce Bounce Rate And Create A More Engaging Site Experience

The bounce rateBounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who visit only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not satisfied with your website. is one of many metrics used in an audit to determine a website’s performance. The metric measures how many times a new user enters your…

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Presented as a percentage, the bounce rate of a website is calculated by dividing the number of people leaving your site before interacting with it in some way by the total number of site visitors it gained during a specific time period – usually between a month – and then multiplying it by 100. This gives an overview of how many people are actively engaging with your website once they access it.

The metric can be made more specific by focusing on the bounce rate of users who accessed the website via a certain source, such as clicking a link on a social post or clicking through on an advert. Knowing the bounce rate in a more detailed way can be really valuable for marketers, as it lets them know which campaigns are working and which aren’t.

Naturally, as it’s a metric that somewhat tracks failed conversions, a high bounce rate is undesirable for digital marketers as it indicates a wider problem about either your website, your marketing or both.

Thankfully, we’ve got a handy list of actions that can help generate a low bounce rate for your website and ensure that more people are sticking around. This is the guide you need when looking at how to reduce your bounce rate.

Why Is A High Bounce Rate Bad?

A high bounce rate percentage means that more people who access your website are simply leaving it without engaging with it in any way. This isn’t good, and the following example can illustrate the reason why this is the case:

Say your business has just created an authoritative social media marketing campaign that helped attract 10,000 new users to your website. That’s great, as it means you’ve captured their attention and piqued their interest enough to have them come to your website.

However, if you have a bounce rate of 60% or more, this means that over half the people coming to your site were put off by what they landed on in some way or another. Having such a high bounce rate means that all your hard work building a good campaign and attracting internet users to your website will be in vain and that it won’t be as effective as it potentially could be.

A high bounce rate can lead to a drop in search traffic to your site, lower conversion rates, as well as a host of other issues.

A high bounce rate is a sign of something not being quite right regarding your website. This means that if you start fixing certain aspects of your website, you should see this percentage decrease over time. Anything under 40% is considered an excellent bounce rate, anything between 40% – 50% is considered average. Here’s a look at a few things you can do to reduce bounce rate and make your website more engaging.

Improve Readability

One of the most common reasons a user might be bouncing is because they are put off by the readability of your content and are going elsewhere to get the information they need.

Split Your Content

Making your content easy to read and legible is one of the key principles of a good and engaging customer experience. Therefore, if your landing page has large chunks of text, consider changing this, as it could be scaring users away.

It’s good practice to split your content into easy-to-digest paragraphs that go no longer than four lines each. This ensures that the content can be skimmed easily, allowing the user to find the relevant information that they’re looking for quickly.

Font and Colours

Another thing to think about regarding the readability of your content is the font and colour scheme you use. You want to ensure that what you’re writing is legible, meaning that you should go with easy-to-see serifs fonts and a background and font colour combination that contract well so that the text can be easily seen.

Ideally, you want a dark font over a light background so that the text isn’t lost in the background. If in doubt, stick to a black or dark blue font over a white background and use your brand colours on things like your header and footer, menu bar, and logo instead.

Format

How you format your content can also aid readability too. Your content will be vastly improved if you:

use subheadings to create distinct sections,
bullet points and lists to present easy-to-understand information,
and images and graphs to add life and context to a piece.

You can learn more about readability and other marketing topics to help you create a low bounce rate on our Knowledge Hub.

Create Better Call-To-Actions

A call to action is a prompt on your website to encourage users to take specific actions. To improve your bounce rate and ensure that you get more conversions on your website, you want to ensure that your CTA is compelling and makes the user want to use it.

For a call to action to be effective, it needs to match the expectations of the user. For example, if the user entered the landing page expecting it to be a sign up form for an email newsletter, they will be extremely put off and confused if your call to action is prompting them to buy a product on your online store.

Improving your CTA is just one of the many tricks to reduce bounce rate, and here are a few other things you can do:

Edit the font and text of the CTA. It’s best that your CTA stands out and is exciting, as that will make it more enticing. Use persuasive language and bright colours to help it pop and attract the attention of the user.

Place it above the foldAbove the fold refers to the visible portion of a webpage. Above the fold content is what a user sees without scrolling and has a greater chance of being read or clicked.. If your CTA isn’t visible on your landing page without scrolling, it means that it’s less effective as it could get lost.

Make it a button. If your call to action is a simple hyperlink within a paragraph of text, it might be better to make it a button to stand out more and feel more important. A button will draw the eye and be far more exciting for the user.

Decrease Page Loading Times

The performance of your website is one of the major factors that can negatively affect your bounce rate. With technology being as advanced as it is, people have become impatient, meaning that if your website fails to load in a snappy manner, users will give up and look elsewhere.

An acceptable page loading time is anything between 2-5 seconds. Anything over that will contribute to a far greater bounce rate. Every second over 2 seconds will increase this percentage, so it’s good to try to ensure that all your pages load within this timeframe, especially if users are browsing on a desktop.

One of the biggest contributors to a slow load time is visual media such as pictures and videos. If the file sizes for these are too big, it will make your website slower as it struggles to load these assets. One of the best things you can do to improve page speed is to compress these images. Other things you can do include using a dedicated, high-performing server to host your website, minify CSS and your code to make it more streamlined, and streamline your HTML to ensure that it’s not bloated.

Ensure The Website Is Mobile Friendly

The main way people browse the internet these days is through mobile. This means that all content needs to be optimized for mobile browsers for it to be effective. Your landing page could be the most beautiful, well-designed page possible on desktop, but if its structure and visuals break when viewed on mobile, then you’re going to generate a huge bounce rate from visitors accessing it through this medium.

When creating your landing page, it’s best to think mobile-first and then adapt it for desktop, not the other way around. A website designed with mobile in mind will ensure that it’s easier to use on these devices and will look and perform well.

Some fundamentals of making a good mobile website include:

Keep your web design simple
Use large buttons so that they can be tapped on easier
Use larger fonts
Include the viewpoint meta tag to ensure that the website opens with an appropriate width for the mobile. There’s nothing worse for a user than having to scroll from side to side to read copy.
Avoid pop-up adverts that cover the whole screen. This ruins the user experience, and it will contribute to a high bounce rate.

Keep Content Up-To-Date

When people browse the web, regardless of their quires and intentions, they want to find the most up-to-date information possible. This means that to keep a user engaged with your website, you need to ensure that your copy, product descriptions, and other media are updated regularly.

A user in 2021 will not trust a website that hasn’t been updated since 2018, as it gives the impression that it’s inactive and outdated. Whether it’s looking for information or when buying a product, people want cutting edge.

To ensure that your user experience is as good as it can be, recycle and update old content to keep it fresh and conduct enough research to ensure everything written is current.

Conclusion

The bounce rate metric is one of the most fundamental pieces of data for digital marketers, as it gives you an insight into how your website is performing. It can be the first indication that something is wrong with a webpage, meaning that tracking this regularly and using these tips to address the issue will make your website better to use.

Your website and landing pages are the most important online assets your business has. Do everything you can to ensure that it’s performing at its highest potential. Working to have a low bounce rate will help you do just that.