How to reduce bounce rate on website

Do you want to reduce bounce rate of a website or blog or WordPress? Is your bounce rate high or too high?

Here we will share effective proven methods how – to reduce bounce rate and increase conversion rates on website.

High bounce rate is one of the most common conversion killers.

If most of your users are abandoning your website on the first page then you do not have a chance to convert them into subscribers or customers.

It is difficult to come to terms with it. After all you love your website so why not everyone else?

Let us look at what bounce rate is and how you can decrease it.

Table of Content

Below are the contents of how to increase conversion rate and reduce bounce rate on website and why it is important for your business.

Click on any of them to get diectly to your prefered section or you can scroll down slowly and read from the start.

What is Bounce Rate?

A bounce rate is the percentage – % of users who land on your website and decide to leave without going to a second page.

A higher bounce rate indicates that you were not able to convince the user to stay and act on your call-to-action like buying your product or signing up for your email etc.

A visitor can bounce from your site in various different ways:

by clicking on a link to a different website
clicking the back button to leave your website
closing the open window or tab
typing a new URL or
due to a session time out caused by web hosting

You are now thinking well that is just normal customer behaviour right? Well yes but there is a thing called a good bounce rate and a bad bounce rate.

Further Reading: Choosing the Right Domain Name

What Is a Good Bounce Rate?

Below is an average bounce rate determined by industry benchmarks and you may be wondering what a good bounce rate is?

Well the general rule of thumb is that:

80%+ is very bad
70 – 80% is poor
50 – 70% is average
30 – 50% is excellent
20% or below is likely a tracking error due to duplicate analytics code, incorrect implementation of events tracking, third-party add-ons such as live chat plugins.

It really depends on your site, the type of content you have, your business goals and it varies across different sectors of the industry.

Some marketers even think that bounce rate can influence your search rankings via Google’s new machine-learning algorithm – RankBrain. Therefore it is obvious in your interest to optimise this metric.

Take a look at the following chart below to see an average bounce rate by industry:

Many site managers and webmasters pay close attention to bounce rate.

It is an overall indication of a site’s stickiness or appeal and they would like to reduce this number as much as they can.

If you have a higher than average bounce rate then it could be caused by one of the many reasons such as follows:

slow load time
poor navigation
bad design
poor usability
lacks clear call-to-action and more.

Now let us take a look on how you can make your pages stand out and reduce those bounce rate.

How to Reduce Bounce Rate

Identifying and fixing the problems with your landing pages can easily fix your high bounce rate problem.

We will walk you through some of the most common pitfalls of higher bounce rates and how to fix them.

Before you start, it is a good idea to identify your top pages with the highest bounce rate.

You can do this by going to Google Analytics and clicking on Behaviour » Site Content » Landing Pages

Knowing the top pages will help you identify the problem areas and fix them.

Here are different ways on how to reduce bounce rate.

There are in no order of importance since all of them are equally important and different in their on outcome.

Further Reading: How to Write a Good Meta Description for SEO

1. Improve On a Better Overall User Experience

Neilsen Norman Group, the prominent usability research consulting firm defines user experience as:

User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services and its products.

User experience is the overall feeling of a user while they are interacting with your website.

Good user experience is when a user finds a website not only easy to use but also pleasing.

Creating a usable website that looks equally great on all platforms and devices is the first step in the direction.

Carefully watch out how your users behave and what influences their decisions.

Remember it is the overall feeling that a user experiences when using your website therefore everything is part of the user experience.

2. Optimise Page Load Time

Many marketers assume that if their bounce rate is high then the issue must lie with a page’s content.

In fact serious problems can arise before a user even has the chance to read a page at all.

Plus as page load time goes from one to ten seconds the probability of a mobile user bouncing increases by 123%.

Of all the problems a web page can have is for it to take forever to load.

After all it does not matter how great or bad a page’s content is if a user cannot read it or even worse -see it. Therefore increasing your website speed is absolutely crucial.

55% of users expect a web page to load in three seconds or less making on-page optimisation crucial to reducing your bounce rate.

Highlighted below are some ways that you can use to increase load times, improve performance and boost the user experience on your website.

Mobile Users

This is especially true for mobile users.

According to recent studies, a connection speed delay of just 500 milliseconds can result in an increase in peak frustration of more than 26% and a decrease in engagement of 9%.

Furthermore slow-loading pages are among the leading causes of shopping cart abandonment for ecommerce retailers.

Amazingly only 2% of the world’s leading 100 ecommerce websites have mobile sites that load fully in less than five seconds on mobile devices and one-fifth take almost eight seconds to load completely.

This is almost criminally long time for sites that live and die by conversion rate optimisation.

Before you even think of looking at the content of your pages – make sure your visitors can actually view them in a reasonable amount of time.

Further Reading: Create Your Own Top Level Domain (TLD)

3. Create More Valuable Content with Smart Formatting

Have you ever clicked through to a blog post or web page – only to discover an immense, intimidating wall of text?

If so you already know how discouraging this can be for your users.

Even if your content is incredibly valuable and completely unique, it would not matter if your readers are scared off by the prospect of wading into a blog post of equal density.

Formatting your pages to be as welcoming and accessible as possible is one of the best ways to reduce bounce rate.

The less work a visitor has to do to get what they want, the more likely they are to stick around.

Do not overwhelm your visitors with weighty paragraphs that span entire pages and make use of white space to make your content more approachable.

Here are some ways to make content less visually intimidating:

Appropriate use of headers
Frequent subheadings
Suitable images
Bulleted lists (see what I did here?)

Use of these formatting options makes your content more accessible.

It allows the user to scan or skim your content quickly to identify points that are most relevant to their needs.

Trust your audience to know what they need then give it to them.

I have seen blogs that while offering useful information insist on using a line break or including an image between every single sentence.

This is can be just as annoying as huge walls of text.

4. Create an Affirmative Call of Action (CTA)

Most users decide whether or not they like a website in the first three seconds.

This is often with just a simple glance at the visible area without scrolling. This area differs from one device to another.

Now that you know what your users are looking at, you can optimise this area.

It should immediately describe what you are selling and there should be a prominent visible call to action.

Once you know what you want them to do, you can prompt your visitors to take action by including ONE crystal-clear call to action.

Make your call to action clear and honest. Misleading users will create a bad user experience which is the number one reason for high bounce rate and low conversions.

The more CTAs you include on a single page the more likely you are going to confuse and overwhelm your visitors.

Do not overwhelm your visitors with dozens of CTAs. Think about user intent and how your pages can help visitors accomplish their goal.

Just include a clear, relevant affirmative call to action that helps them get the job done.

Your site should make it effortless for visitors to find and do what they want to clearly, efficiently and easily.

Further Reading: What is SEO Friendly URL Structure

5. Improve Website Speed

As mentioned earlier users make up their mind about a website in the first three seconds.

You do not want to waste this time showing them a blank page loading scripts and downloading content.

There are many tools you can do to accomplish this.

There are a few free website speed test monitoring tools one can use – Pingdom or Up Trends or GT Metrix and Google Page Speed – you can optimise every landing page on your site.

According to recent studies – a one-second delay can cost you 7% of sales, 11% fewer page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

To speed up your site, you should optimise your images, use a Content Delivery Network, add better caching, split long lengthy blog posts into pages and consider switching to a faster hosting provider.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to keep your website speedy is by using a CDN.

To find the right one for you please read more on the list of the best CDN providers to speed up your website.

A. Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

When your site is hosted on one server, each user who visits it sends requests to that same server.

This means that when your site experiences high levels of traffic, the time it takes to process each request increases thus slowing down load times for all of them.

When you consider that high-traffic times present a ton of growth potential for your business, this is far from ideal.

It is faster for someone in Los Angeles to access to a server in San Francisco than it is for that same person to reach a server in London or even Chicago.

A CDN or Content Delivery Network can help you eliminate these issues. With a CDN you cache your site on a global network of servers.

When a user’s browser requests files from your site that request is routed to the closest server.

The goal of a content delivery network or CDN is to improve website performance by picking a server that is closest to the end user.

B. Choosing a Content Delivery Network - CDN

For example, let’s say your origin server is in California, but uses a CDN to host files globally. Your network might look something like this:

The content that user receives is identical but can load much faster than it would if their browser were making requests to a server that was geographically far away.

This eliminates loading lags and latency issues that users located far from hosting servers sometimes experience.

If you want to start using a CDN your best options are Max CDN and Cloudflare.

Max CDN is a full CDN that means that it only offers CDN services. They have more data centres and focus solely on improving load times.

On the other hand Cloudflare combines CDN service with security and optimisation features.

The one you choose depends on whether you want those extra features or just want to focus on improving speed and either way setting up is fairly a quick process.

Further Reading: Online Marketing Strategies for Small Business

6. Optimise Relevant Keywords

Apart from technical considerations like page load times or failing to adhere to formatting best practices, one of the biggest contributing factors to high bounce rates is relevance or irrelevance.

Some sites target certain keywords very effectively. This is to serve content that is relevant to that query at best or get it wrong with irrelevant at worst.

If the page you are serving is not directly relevant to a user’s query, you can almost certain that they are going to bounce.

Therefore it is absolutely vital that you optimise for relevance above all other considerations.

If you decide to go after a keyword and end up ranking for it, make sure the content of the page you serve is highly key word relevant to that query.

Consider user intent when targeting keywords. Is the prospect looking to learn something or buy something?

What stage of the funnel are they in? What problem are they trying to solve?

These are all questions that can help you provide the most useful, relevant content to your audience.

The more relevant your content is to users’ queries, the more likely they are to stick around once they arrive on your site.

Further Reading: How to Write Good Title Tags for SEO

7. A/B Testing + Targeted Landing Pages

It is possible that your headline or call-to-action is not working. That is why it is important to perform a -A/B test.

Use different content strategies on each page and run A/B split tests to see how each of them performs.

You can also create different landing pages, targeting different audiences, regions, keywords and more.

If you are serving an international audience – then you can detect a user’s location and show them a localised landing page.

Showing users’ content in their own language, currency and cultural background greatly improves user experience.

8. Use Videos to Engage With Audience

Videos are highly engaging and grab attention more than text or even images.

You can use a full screen video as a background or add it next to your call of action.

Videos are powerful. You can use animations, music, audio, narration, colours and so many different forms of persuasion tools.

You can create a very effective video presentation with a small budget by hiring a freelancer.

Further Reading: Why You Need a Mobile Friendly Website

9. Use High-Quality Images to Captivate User Attention

Using high quality images are another effective tool that you can use to decrease your bounce rate.

This is the main reason why so many websites use high-quality photographs as full screen backgrounds to prove its effectiveness.

Companies like Google who are famous for their plain white background and minimalistic layouts are now using high-quality images on their landing pages.

You can purchase professional photographs from various stock photography websites.

There are several online websites that offer royalty-free images as well like unsplash, pixaby, pexels, shutterstock, freeimages and the lists goes on and on.

You can use these high-quality images as full screen backgrounds, parallax backgrounds, background slides or as inline images next to your call to actions.

10. Use Sidebar Widgets and Promotions Sparingly

Some web pages are an ideal vehicle for offering relevant content, offers and other material to your audience.

Blog pages are a prime example and you would probably struggle to find a decent blog without something in the sidebar.

However cramming the digital margins of your content with ads, offers, award emblems and other crap is a sure fire way to overwhelm your visitor and tempt them to bounce.

If you want to highlight relevant contents on your sidebar always try to do so in a way that offers the reader some relevant value.

For example – related article recommendations that expand upon the topic covered in a blog post is a great way to make your site stickier as well as providing genuine valuable and useful content to your readers.

Similarly if you choose to include awards and trust signals in your sidebar – make sure they are from only the most reputable and renowned sources so that they serve an actual purpose.

Also be aware of the different type of pop-ups offered by businesses and services.

These promotions can be highly effective but they can also be terribly distracting and annoying especially if you set them to appear the moment a user visits your page.

Give your visitors enough time to immerse themselves in your content before pouncing on them with newsletter sign-up offers or other promotions.

Do not push too hard or too fast or you will lose them

Further Reading: How To Optimise Images for SEO

11. Improve with Creative Product Pages

Getting product pages right the first time can be tricky. Offer too much information and you risk overwhelming your visitors.

Offer too little and your prospects may not feel as though they have enough information to make an informed decision.

However if you spend a bit of time looking at product pages you will probably notice several opportunities for optimisation that could decrease bounce rates and improve conversion rates.

One of the major reasons people fail to convert from product pages is because they are not ready to complete a purchase or transaction.

Sometimes it can be buyer hesitation or an aversion to price and sometimes it is because the information they want about a product is not provided.

This could include details on where something was manufactured, the specifics of your return policy or user reviews.

It is worth remembering that bounce rates from product pages can be a little higher than other types of pages.

This can vary depending on the nature of the product or service in question.

However if you are noticing unusually high bounce rates on your product pages – consider testing whether adding more information helps.

Is your return policy clearly stated on your product pages to offset prospects’ risk aversion? Is it clear how and where the product was made?

What do your satisfied customers think of your products and are these rave reviews featured prominently?

As always – be sure to A/B test these variables before committing to any firm decisions.

12. Let Customers Speak - Testimonials

You will see it on many websites a tiny little testimonials slider showing a quote from one customer at a time.

While it does the job you can make it a lot more effective.

Convert your testimonials into success stories with actual storytelling elements like audio, video, illustrations to showcase your clients.

People love success stories and they would want to read more.

You can also create a testimonials page where all you have is just user or customer testimonials.

Further Reading: Different Types of Websites to Create

13. Create Useful Internal Link Structure

Many experienced and helpful marketers have always advocated including some internal links in your content as a way to reduce your bounce rate.

Although this strategy can work well it can also back fire if too many unrelated links are included.

We have all seen and experienced sites that link internally in every other sentence and this looks awful.

It does not help with enriching the user experience or offer audiences something of genuine value.

This can confuse, overwhelm your visitors.

It can also dissuade visitors from clicking any of the internal links in the first place causing them to leave your site therefore how to reduce bounce rate is important.

When choosing internal links and anchor text – always focus on relevance and a logical linking strategy.

Resist the temptation to internally link to every article in your archive and focus on linking to useful articles or pages that are highly relevant and potentially useful to your visitors.

14. Plan a Consistent Content Strategy

Many marketing experts would recommend you to experiment with different content strategies but be on a consistent content plan.

How can these two be achieved at the same time?

Many successful websites have them in place today and you need to make a content plan that allows you to use different content strategies at the same time.

Just look at BuzzFeed and how their content strategy includes a growing list of social content platforms, mediums and formats.

These contents range from GIFs to slideshows, SnapChat to YouTube to Quizzes.

If they think that their users would find something engaging – they use it.

Your business goals may be different but you want your content strategy to be exactly the same as Buzzfeed. You want users to stay on your website.

Further Reading: Choosing Right Domain Name for Your Website

15. Optimise for Mobile Friendly

According to Google’s Mobile Friendly Test, almost 24% of the top 1 million most popular websites in the world are not mobile friendly. We have to reiterate how important this is.

With the number of users accessing the web primarily from mobile devices increasing every year, failing to optimise your site for mobile is practically begging for users to bounce.

Customers will take their business elsewhere and you will lose out on potential profits on your table.

The world is going mobile. Do not just optimise for it. Make it a priority.

It is difficult to understate just how crucial mobile optimisation is for every type of site and you should strongly consider creating a mobile friendly site regardless of the time, effort and expense involved.

It does not matter how pretty your site looks on an iPhone or any smart phone if it takes more than a minute to load – customers will bounce.

Further Reading: Online Marketing Strategies for Small Business

16. Make Your Site Readable

Majority of content on most websites are in text format.

It is unfortunate that this important part of any website’s user experience is often the most neglected one.

This is one of the most important and crucial elements that could shape your site’s visual appeal.

You need to make sure that the text on your website is easily readable on all devices.

It should not be too small or else users will have to squint or zoom in to read it. Use font sizes that are large enough on smaller screens.

Typography or readability is not just limited to choosing the font size and colour.

You also need to make sure that the text on your website looks beautiful.

There should be enough line spacing, padding and margins to make text look clean and beautiful.

Another important point to consider is the language and style you choose to use on your website.

Use easy-to-understand language in a normal conversational tone.

17. Reduce server response time

Another factor that reduces your bounce rate is how quickly your page loads is the amount of time your Domain Name Server (DNS) lookup takes.

A DNS is a server with a database of IP addresses and their associated hostnames.

When a user types a URL into their browser the DNS server then translates that URL into the IP address that indicates its location online.

A. DNS Lookup

A DNS lookup is the process of a finding a specific DNS record. You can think of it as your computer looking up a number in a phone book.

Your ISP will perform a DNS lookup to find the IP address associated with that URL.

The amount of time it takes depends on how fast your DNS provider is or it may be time to switch to a faster DNS provider.

You can check out the appropriate DNS speed comparison report which is updated monthly to get an idea of where your provider stacks up and see which providers offer higher speeds.

If you are using a slow DNS it may be time to switch to a faster DNS provider to speed up the process.

Further Reading: Get Traffic to Your Website Fast

18. Show Your Credibility

Consumers are getting smarter every day, this means that they go through careful examination of an offer before they make up their minds.

After the initial assessment of your product – consumers quickly look around to find out how reliable your site is.

It is not easy to trust a new business with your money or information. A new user does not know how good your business is and what kind of reputation you have earned.

Proudly display the glowing reviews of your product or services from third-party websites like Google reviews, Trust Pilot, Yelp Reviews and many more.

Showcase your awards, endorsements, certifications, quality scores, and industry affiliations. Make your website secure and display safety seals.

This builds user trust so they are comfortable handing out their credit card and personal information.

19. Target Abandoning Users

Despite all your efforts sometimes a user may still want to leave your website.

It is not your fault – maybe something came up in their personal life and they just had to leave.

Now you have two choices: you can either let them go or you can convert them into a subscriber.

With OptinMonster’s signature Exit-Intent® technology, you can track when a user is about to leave your website and show them a targeted message at the precise moment.

This is a highly effective technique with a proven success rate.

One of the most common use cases of exit-intent technology is to reduce cart abandonment and increase conversions using an exit-intent popup.

On average our publishers are seeing a 150 – 600% increase in email signups when they use exit-intent along with their content marketing efforts.

Most websites just ask users for their email address. It allows them to stay in touch with the user by sending them relevant offers and eventually convert them into paying customers.

You can also show a last-minute discount with your exit-intent popup.

But remember if a user decides not to accept the offer then they can just close the window and never come back again.

If you combine an exit offer with a subscription form – this gives your visitors the chance to stay in touch!

Further Reading: Create Engaging Content for Social Media

20. Targeting Engaged Users

Often your engaged users can also bounce without taking any action. This is very common for blog posts and resources section.

The users come to your article -find what they want and they leave (this is normal).

But that does not help your conversions. In this case you want to show your users with the most relevant offer.

For example – if a user lands on a blog post about cooking then your offer should be a recipe book instead of fashion items.

Using OptinMonster’s page-level targeting, you can show visitors customised offers based on the pages they visit, traffic source and more.

This will help you reduce your bounce rate, boost engagement and conversions.

21. Reduce website plugins

So far plugins can do a lot to improve your WordPress site like adding custom functionality, clean up your code and improve user experience and more.

They also eliminate the need to mess with a lot of code which makes it user friendly experience when working on your site and easy to install

It is easy to continue adding and installing plugins without considering the potential downside – reduce loading time hence higher bounce rate.

They can slow your site, create security issues and even cause crashes and other technical difficulties.

A. Maintenence and updates

Keeping up with maintenance and updates can be tedious when there are a lot of plugins involved.

It is always a good idea to evaluate the ones you have installed on a regular basis.

This is to check if they are outdated, inefficient or incorrectly configured to reduce negative impact on your site speed.

Deactivating and deleting those which are unnecessary can improve your overall speed and make maintenance easier.

B. Evaluate plugin process

There is only one way you can evaluate the plugins on your site and weed out any that slow your site speed.

Individually selecting and disabling each plugins then measure your site’s performance.

This can be a tedious and long process if you have a lot of plugins however it will show you the difference each one makes.

Run a speed test with all of your plugins enabled. You can do this with tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom or Up Trends site speed tool.

Then experiment by deactivating your plugins one at a time and re-testing your speed.

Make a note of your page load times after each test and which plugins you deactivated to achieve faster speeds. Remember if you have a lot of plugins this could take a while.

Conclusion

We hope this article has given you some great ways how to reduce bounce rate and increase conversion rate on either website, blog, WordPress or e-commerce.

Best-digital marketing services

You can contact our skilled professionals at Best-Digital Marketing.

We know how to implement all the necessary strategies and more to increase conversion rate and reduce bounce rate for website, blogs, WordPress or e-commerce aspects.

It will save you lots of time and work and will also net better results.

Contact us now to learn how Best- Digital Marketing specialist with creative knowledge and experience can help you reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.

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