What is Causing Your Site’s High Bounce Rate?

If you are wondering why visitors to your site bounce (leave after a few moments on one page) instead of converting into sales, any number of issues could cause it. Also, if your bounce rate is below 60%, your site is average; if it is 40% or lower, you are hitting a home run every day. If you have average to below-average bounce rates and want to improve, here are a few things you should be mindful of when determining what is causing your site’s high bounce rate.

Your Site is Just Too Slow

Google is cognizant of how slow sites annoy visitors and uses site speed as one of the factors in how its crawlers rank websites. In today’s world, no one is willing to wait over three seconds for a page to load. If you are unaware of your site load speed, tools such as GT Metrix and Pingdom will help you determine if your site is speedy enough. If it loads too slowly, you need to find the cause; is it using too many hero images that the file size is so big it drags down the load time? Perhaps your web hosting service is what you expected and is bogging down your site.

Error Messages and Missing Pages

How do you feel when you go to a website and are greeted with an error message or a blank page? It’s not likely you will stay. With these two issues, there is a near 100% chance that a bounce will happen, and, likely, the visitor will never return to your site. In addition to impacting your SEO, error messages and pages that aren’t there will cause a loss of sales and negatively impact your Brand. It gives users the impression your company is unreliable and unprofessional. Repairing broken links will help to keep visitors on your site.

Your Content is Not Good

If you haven’t updated your site since 2007, you are using outdated graphics and images, and the content on your website is likely obsolete as well. Having an outdated site gives customers the impression that your company is lazy, and it also prevents the crawlers from search engines from ranking your company. In this way, you are more likely to harm your company through a higher bounce rate, and the website’s practically invisible to search engines. Be sure the content on your website is easy to read and concise; if visitors need to read an exposition before they reach your call to action, they will likely quit reading a quarter of the way through. Ensure that your web pages are scannable by using bullet points and header tags it will make reading much easier for your visitors.

Blasting Visitors with Pop-Ups and Requests

How do you feel when you visit a site and you are confronted with a pop-up selling something or asking you to subscribe to something as soon as it loads? If a user is trying to read a five hundred word article and there are massive ads, with overpowering sound, occurring within every one hundred words, do you think they will stay? A solid call to action is crucial to converting visits to your website into sales, but having too many distracts from your content. Limiting pop-ups and reducing ads and calls to action will help lower your bounce rate.

Why Aren’t You Optimized for Mobile?

If your site is not optimized for mobile use, you are putting your site at a severe disadvantage. Using mobile devices to access the internet has been the standard since 2014. If your site doesn’t load into a mobile device accurately due to it not being optimized, users on mobile devices won’t stay to purchase your goods or services.

It’s Not Complicated

Fixing these five problems will lower your bounce rate and, in turn, will bring increased sales.

Contact us if you have questions about how Incend Media can help improve your website conversions!

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