Is your bounce rate through the roof? Are you not converting your visitors, or at the very least not even getting them past your home page? Making sure your users aren’t leaving your website immediately is essential to its success, and yet the average page visit lasts a little less than a minute.
As users rush through absorbing the content on sites (and are doing so faster and faster these days), they take the time to read less than a quarter of the text on the pages they actually visit. So unless everything on your site is incredibly clear and focused, little of what you say on your website will get through to potential customers when they’re ready to make a decision.
Knowing that you only have a very short window of opportunity to reach these users is daunting, but take that short time frame and decrease it dramatically if you present other obstacles to their attention. Here are some a few common reasons why you might be seeing a high bounce rate in your site analytics.
So Why Is My Bounce Rate So High?
1. Slow Load Time
According to surveys, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in less than 2 seconds, and they tend to bounce from a site that isn’t loaded in 3 seconds. This means that you’re not just losing conversions from visitors currently on your site, but that loss is because of a few seconds difference.
Since page speed is also an established metric for how Google positions search engine rankings, there’s no reason to not make use of free tools like Page Speed Insights and Pingdom to get insights how to increase your site speed and lower your bounce rate.
2. Obtrusive Ads
Not only do ads on a site effect the page load time, but they can get in the way of the content the user came to see. If you make the site difficult to engage with, you’re not only punishing your visitors, but could potentially be punishing yourself if Google thinks the user experience is not smooth.
If you present these ads with popups and modals to promote your newsletter or app, you’re basically telling the visitor to not come back. This is also why ad and popup blockers are exploding in popularity.
3. Auto Playing Video/Audio
It’s 2022. Why is this still happening?
4. Poor Navigation/User Experience
Another way to see a high number in your bounce rate column is to make it complicated for them to figure out how to immediately find the content they came for. Menus everywhere (or nowhere), walls of text (or no text), giant sliders (also a speed issue), complicated and unnecessary special effects and features…
All of these things can overwhelm or confuse an average user and cause them to take off before getting to your checkout page, your contact form, or your phone number. Keep an eye on your analytics to get an idea of where you’re losing visitors throughout your site.
5. Redirects
When a visitor clicks on a link, they expect to be taken to that link, not get redirected to a subscribe page, an advertisement, or anywhere they didn’t intend to go. If you do have to redirect them (and there are occasionally good reason to), make sure your domain reflects that they’re still on the site they clicked to.
For example, if we were to redirect our blog page to a different site, it would be in our best interest to call it 1981digitalblog.com or blog.1981digital.com and so on. That way the user still can confident that they’re still engaging with our online presence, not to mention it adds legitimacy to any redirected sites.
6. Outdated Content
Having outdated content will not only turn away potential visitors, but it will also turn away search engines. This is the entire basis of content marketing, which is one of the most important parts of any digital strategy. Make sure you are constantly keeping your site up to date and have an ongoing content strategy!
7. Mobile Friendly
If your site is not mobile compatible at this point, you’re risking your search engine visibility entirely. Mobile overtook desktop as the primary browsing source 5 years ago, so you are actively driving away customers by not having a mobile-friendly site. If a company is not making themselves accessible to a segment of their users/potential users, then they shouldn’t be ranking higher than those that do.
