Bounce rate is one of the most important metrics you want to track for your website or a specific digital marketing campaign. Your bounce rate is simply the percentage of visitors who navigate to your website and leave without visiting at least one additional page. Essentially, it’s the number of people who are interested enough to check your website out, but quickly decide it doesn’t have what they’re looking for.
Below, we’ll discuss exactly why having a high bounce rate matters and what you can do about it:
Why Is Having a High Bounce Rate a Problem?
Generally, a high bounce rate is an indication that people aren’t interested in your website. Navigating away immediately after arrival means they aren’t looking for additional information or spending much time there. Usually, high bounce rates correlate to lower time spend, conversions, and revenue.
Dealing With Your High Bounce Rate
There are a variety of different reasons why a visitor to your website might choose to bounce. Follow these tips to make sure you’ve checked off all of the important boxes when it comes to optimizing your website:
- Provide relevant, timely information on every single page you have. This will ensure that you’re meeting your audience’s expectations and offering them value no matter the webpage by which they land on your site.
- Take a long, hard look at your website’s load time, removing any unnecessary plugins or sizable graphics. Each extra second of load time exacerbates a high bounce rate—a two-second wait time increases bounce rate by about 5 percent, and a six-second load time by 25 percent.
- Optimize your website for mobile users. If your site performs poorly via phone, an already high bounce rate is only going to skyrocket. Mobile-only users now outnumber desktop-only users and they’re quicker to bounce.
- Make sure your website is simple to use, read, and navigate. Unsightly fonts, text sizes, and color schemes all turn people away.
- Focus on your text fields. If they’re not optimized to always scroll down instead of side-to-side, your website will be very difficult to navigate, especially for mobile users (who will leave without a second thought.)
- Think about the next steps your website visitors might take after landing on your website. Will they be looking for company details, or information about your products and services? Whatever it is, make sure it’s easy to find so that visitors don’t get frustrated and leave without finding the content they really wanted.
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