Are you a website owner who is struggling with the users leaving your website? Well, this is a very common concern amongst website owners and marketers.
There have been various attempts to retain the users of the website and make them stay on a particular domain. However, this objective is often challenging to achieve. Moreover, it is difficult to fulfill your business goals through a website that has a high bounce rate.
However, what exactly is bounce rate, and what are the reasons for a high bounce rate? Read this blog until the end to find the answer to these questions.
What Is Bounce Rate?
In technical terms, bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave your website after visiting a single landing page without interacting with it. This interaction may be in the form of scrolling through the webpage, reading content, navigating to other pages of the website, clicking on links/buttons, filling out the website form, etc.
Here’s how bounce rate is calculated:
Bounce Rate: (Single Page Sessions/Total Sessions)X100
For example, if your website has a total of 100 sessions, out of which 15 are single-page sessions, the bounce rate of your website is 15%.
Even though bounce rate is not a ranking factor for a website, it is a critical aspect for website owners. This is because by analyzing the bounce rate, website owners can find out if their investment in web development is fruitful or not.
Generally speaking, every website has its own bounce rate. Various factors such as the website’s type, objectives, target audience, etc. determine how high the bounce rate will go. Therefore, let’s find out the ideal bounce rate of a website.
What Is the Ideal Bounce Rate of a Website?
As mentioned before, every website has it’s own safe bounce rate. Even though you might be initially disappointed looking at the bounce rate of your website, you must know that it is practically impossible to have a 0% bounce rate.
Speaking factually, the bounce rate of an average website can be anywhere from 26% to 70%. The most optimum range for bounce rate is anywhere from 26% to 40%. Moreover, in most cases, a bounce rate of 90% and above is considered alarming.
You must know that a lot goes into determining the bounce rate of a website. The device used for browsing and the website’s type are two of the most crucial factors, amongst many others.
Now that you are aware of the ideal bounce rate of your website, it is time to find out the factors that can result in a high bounce rate for your website.
Reasons Why Your Website Has a High Bounce Rate
Poor UI Design
The first interaction of a user with the website is through its visual appearance. As a result, users do not prefer staying on websites with poorly designed UI.
Users prefer websites that are easy to browse through and navigate. Moreover, users stay on websites that enable them to find what they are looking for and even return again and again.
To elaborate, the lower the quality of your website’s design will be, the more time users will have to spend understanding the navigation of your website. Consequently, the users will have a poor experience with your website and will leave, therefore increasing your bounce rate.
High Load Time
Users usually get impatient with websites that have a high load time. Load time is the time it takes to load a single webpage on your website.
The more the load time of your website is, the more likely users are to abandon your website, therefore contributing to the bounce rate.
This is bad not just in the context of bounce rate but also for business. This is because users will be quick to replace your website with that of a competitor, resulting in revenue loss for a business.
Over-optimized Content
Content optimization is the key to attaining a high-end user experience and generating business. However, over-optimizing your website’s content can result in the user finding all the information in one place and, therefore, not having the need to go to other web pages.
Moreover, a plethora of information on a single webpage can overwhelm the users and degrade the website’s appearance. This will result in a negative user experience.
Therefore, it is safe to say that over-optimization of a website’s content is a key cause of a higher bounce rate. Therefore, it is always a better idea to avoid content over-optimization and break down the content on multiple pages.
Misleading/ Clickbait Title
Most of the users judge whether to visit a website or not by checking its meta title and description. The meta title and description provide a short summary of the webpage and are useful to know what’s on the website before visiting it.
However, many websites misuse this aspect of search engine results and provide wrong information in these criteria. This results in users being misled into clicking a website.
As a result, upon realizing that they have been click-baited, users are quick to leave the website. This, in turn, increases the bounce rate of the website.
Technical Error
Webpages face various errors due to which users are unable to visit them.
Website crashes, server errors, and Error 404 are some of the most common technical errors faced by users as well as website owners.
When users are unable to find what they are looking for, they bounce back to the search engine result page or other pages and therefore contribute to your website’s bounce rate.
Therefore, it is recommended to keep a look at your website and ensure that users are not facing any errors and crashes.
Poor Linking
Links are essential for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and better ranking for your website. Links that redirect to your website help strengthen your domain’s authority.
However, irrelevant and low-quality linking to your website can redirect the wrong users and is a bad SEO practice. Naturally, the wrong audience will leave your website as soon as they realize that it is irrelevant to them.
Ofcourse, this will increase the bounce rate of your website. However, you can overcome this challenge by requesting other domains to remove your link. This will ensure quality website traffic and will reduce your website’s bounce rate.
High Complexity
We mentioned earlier the importance of simple and efficient UI design for a high-end user experience. This concept is also applicable to the website’s complexity.
Integrating too many features into your website will make it unnecessarily complex and will give it a cluttered look. As a result, it will be challenging for the users to find what they are looking for on your website.
This is one of the most common reasons for a high bounce rate of a website. One way to overcome this challenge is to add categories, filters, search bar, and other assortment elements to your website and decrease its complexity.
Lack of Responsive Design
The present-day internet users use various devices to browse websites. Desktop, mobile phones, and tablets are a few of the most common devices. Speaking factually, 55.4% of website browsing takes place through mobile phones.
As a result, lacking a responsive design will deliver a bad UI to certain users of your website and will increase your bounce rate.
Therefore, it is necessary to create a responsive website design to deliver a consistently high-quality user experience to the website visitors. This responsive design has the ability to adjust the website’s elements to the user’s device and, therefore, ensure website functionality.
No CTA
The key to reducing bounce rate is redirecting users to other pages or motivating them to perform certain actions. One of the most common ways to achieve this objective is to use a CTA on the website.
This CTA is not only useful for controlling the bounce rate of your website but will also help in generating business. To elaborate, you can turn your website visitors into potential customers using CTA.
The purpose of these CTA extends to generating leads, solving customer queries, offering user support, and beyond that. Therefore, it is a highly noteworthy idea to add CTA to your website.
Low-Quality Content
Content is an integral part of a website. It is also one of the key reasons for people to visit your website.
However, low-quality content on a website is often challenging to understand for the user. This, in turn, degrades the user’s experience of visiting the website and increases the bounce rate. To add to that, having low-quality content can also negatively impact your website’s ranking on the search engine.
One must ensure that the website has high-quality, SEO-friendly content that is free from grammatical errors and mistakes and has optimum readability. Moreover, one can break the content into different sections to further enhance the content’s readability and the website’s visual appeal.
This was it for the top 10 reasons for a website to have a high bounce rate. Now you must be wondering how to reduce the bounce rate of your website.
Well, there are various ways to do so. You must focus on the above-mentioned reasons and work on rectifying them. Besides that, the next section will cover some expert tips that will help you in reducing your website’s bounce rate.
Tips to Control Bounce Rate of Your Website
Take Expert Help in Web Development
Designing and developing a website is surely not a cakewalk process. Therefore, in order to create a high-end website, you must take assistance from experts in website development.
This assistance will allow you to optimize your website and, in turn, reduce the bounce rate. Generally speaking, web development agencies are the best option in this context.
It is commonly known that when you outsource web development to an agency, you are certain to receive high-end results and quality outputs for your project. These agencies, with their years of experience in web development, are the best match for your requirements. Naturally, these websites will be optimized in various aspects and will have a low bounce rate.
Follow Best SEO Practices
Search Engine Optimization is the key to creating a high-quality website. This is because the criteria for search engine ranking are based on user experience to a great extent.
Therefore, by making an SEO-friendly website, you can not only deliver a high-end user experience but can also rank your website on the search engine.
Naturally, a website that delivers a great UX will have a low bounce rate and high traffic. As a result, following the latest SEO strategies is the best way to create a website with a low bounce rate.
Focus on UI/ UX Design
As we discussed before, a website user’s initial interaction with the website is visual. Moreover, if users are leaving your website is a short time span, it is likely because of the poor quality UI/UX design.
Therefore, focusing on creating a high-quality UI/UX design is the best way to reduce the bounce rate of the website. In the present time, users prefer websites with an aesthetically appealing design, easy navigation, and low complexity.
These types of websites not only reduce the bounce rate of the website but also attracts users and make them spend more time surfing through the webpage.
Reduce Load Time
Factually speaking, high website loading time is one of the most prominent reasons why a website has a high bounce rate. Here is how load time directly affects the bounce rate of your website.
Therefore, by working on reducing the load time of your website, you can surely reduce your website’s bounce rate. One of the most popular ways to do this is to remove unnecessary plug-ins from your website.
Other ways to reduce your website’s load time are to choose the right hosting service, optimize images, and minify your website’s CSS, HTML, and JavaScript codes.
Optimize Content
Content is the founding stone of a website. Therefore, by adding high-quality content to your website, you can most certainly control the bounce rate.
There are various ways in which a website owner can optimize the content. Here are a few of the most crucial ones.
Visual Optimization
Here, a website’s content is optimized to add an appealing look. This can be done by breaking long content into different sections, using headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.), and following the best writing practices (correct case, font style, font size, theme, etc.). This will make the content of your website easily readable and will allow the user to navigate and find what they’re looking for.
SEO-wise Optimization
SEO-friendly content will help your website to rank in the search engine. Creating this type of content often requires technical knowledge of SEO writing and is a task better left to the experts. Nevertheless, a few tips to follow while creating SEO-friendly content are to use relevant keywords, focus on optimum keyword placement and use good quality content.
Quality Optimization
This is undoubtedly the most crucial aspect out of all three. If you follow both of the above tips and still fail to add high-quality content to your website, your website is most likely to suffer from a high bounce rate. By quality optimization, we refer to adding content that is free from grammatical & punctuation errors, has good readability, and is easy to understand.
These were a few of the top ways through which you can reduce the load time of your website. Out of all these ways, outsourcing your website’s design and development is the most promising one. The assistance and inputs of an experienced web development agency will enable you to get a high-end website with a low bounce rate.
The Bottom Line
We hope that by now, you are clear on your question, what are the factors that can increase the bounce rate of a website?
We have covered website bounce rate from various angles in the blog and have listed down the top 10 reasons for a website to have a high bounce rate.
Moreover, the last section of the blog has covered various crucial tips on how one can reduce the bounce rate of their website.
Overall, you can use this blog to identify and correct the reason for your website’s high bounce rate and create a seamlessly performing website.
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