One of the most important and telling metrics for any website owner nowadays is the bounce rate. Your bounce rate is in many ways the ultimate measure of your site’s performance. If your visitors come in and just bounce right out, then that means that there is something fundamentally wrong with your website. And no matter how good of a marketer you are, all of your efforts will go down the drain with an underperforming website. Here are some of the most common reasons why you can’t retain visitors.
You Site is Painfully Slow
There was a time when site speed was irrelevant when it came to judging the quality of a website. But since Google started paying more importance to user experience, page loading speed became one major criteria for ranking websites.
That means that if your site is slow, not only do you risk losing more visitors, but you might attract less through search engines as well. This is why you should do everything in your power to correct the situation immediately if that’s the case.
Some of the things you could do include removing heavy elements like Flash and compressing your images. Compressed images will look just as good for the most part and big image files can have a huge effect on page loading times, especially on mobile devices. Going for a dedicated server would be a good option as well if you have a shared hosting plan since they tend to be less reliable performance wise.
If you’re looking for other ways to improve your site’s design and performance, you can always check out sites like Design Authority for advice.
Your Content Doesn’t Match the Intent
One of the worst things you can do is not deliver on what your visitors expect. Some people build their websites and deliberately craft their headlines and meta tag descriptions to attract a certain type of traffic. But if you fail to deliver and don’t give your visitors what they want, they’ll immediately bounce right out.
While this method used to be somewhat beneficial when bounce rates didn’t matter to search engines, it’s just bad business to use this kind of method today. So, make sure that your descriptions and headlines are congruent with your content if you want better results.
Your Content is Too Efficient
At the opposite side of the spectrum, maybe your visitor was able to find the information they were looking for right away and you managed to present it in a way that immediately answered their queries. In this case, this is actually not a bad thing. However, you’ll have to do something to get them to stay on your website. This could be adding links to other pages in your content or by prompting the visitor to check out some of your blog posts if they just filled a simple CTA form for instance.
Bounce rates are not something you should ignore, and if yours are too high, then you should rectify the situation immediately. Make sure that you follow the tips in this article if you want to improve your site’s bounce rate and conversions.
