bounce rate - what it is and what you can do about it

Your Bounce Rate Can Kill Your Website’s Success

The whole point of running a successful website is to drive steady traffic to it. The thing is, you don’t just want a lot of visitors. You also want them to stay a while and explore your site. You want visitors to soak up your content like a sponge, as well as like, tweet, recommend and share your site all over the internet. So what’s holding you back? It can be one surprisingly tough aspect to conquer, called your bounce rate.

What is a Bounce Rate?

A bounce rate is when visitors come to your site and immediately leave. If people are coming to your site and immediately going somewhere else, they aren’t finding what they’re looking for. Your bounce rate can hurt you more than you’d think. Let’s look at what affects your bounce rate and a few ways a high bounce rate can hurt you.

What Causes a High Bounce Rate?

There are several factors that cause a high bounce rate. If you have a high bounce rate, you might want to take a look at these factors and see if your website is guilty of any of these examples.

A Long Load Time

A long load time will kill your site. Forget everything else. if your site takes more than 3-5 seconds to load, optimize your site using a CDN, caching, minification, and a good web host. *Bluehost!!! Cough cough*

Harsh Colors

Don’t set your site’s background to neon green, yellow, of such a bright red that it burns my retinas. Don’t make your site difficult to stare at.

UX/UI Problems

if your site is tough to navigate and operate, refine it and make it easy and fun to use. Don’t make people work or waste time to get access to your content.

Poor Content

Do your research, add an image or two, and add your personality in your writing. People aren’t there to receive a lecture from Ben Stein, they are there to hear from you. be yourself and write good content.

Broken Links

Check your links. if you don’t hook something up right, or you promote the wrong link in an email or social media, visitors will leave immediately.

Complicated Writing

Don’t try to write a uni-bomber manifesto for each blog post. keep your thoughts clear, concise and to the point.

Poor Contrast

While colors shouldn’t be too bright, you also want enough contrast between your background and your text to make it easy to read.

Things You Can Do to Lower Your Bounce Rate

  • Add a few of these key elements to your site to drastically lower your bounce rate.
  • Include videos to keep visitors on longer.
  • Embed infographics to back up facts and add visuals.
  • Add quality images or simple graphics to reinforce your message.
  • Link to similar or related content throughout the rest of your site.

Conclusion

If you want to lower your bounce rate, follow these directions to make a difference with your own website. Do you have anymore tips to lower your bounce rate? Feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

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