How to Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate (in Less than 500 Words)

by Josh Barney

A ‘bounce’ is when a visitor leaves a website after only visiting one page on the site.Click To Tweet This means that they do not navigate anywhere else, use the menu or click any internal links. They arrive, view the landing page and then leave.

A high bounce rate % can indicate a variety of different problems with a website, but instead of boring you with problems, in this article I’m going to use just 500 words to explain how you can overcome this digital irritation.

Ready?

BTW: This should take you less than 1.5 minutes to read

website load speed

A lot of people will exit your website before they even make it there. They click on the link, can’t be bothered to wait a few seconds for your page to load and exit immediately.

This type of bounce can be avoided by ensuring that your website is optimised for speed on mobile and desktop.

A high percentage of websites (particularly blogs) make the mistake of not providing any internal links. Make sure you give every visitor the opportunity to visit other pages on your website!

content links bounce rate

The best way to ensure that visitors click on your links is to personalise your recommendations. If you can place your content and products into categories (or topics) and recommend other relevant pages from the same category, it will have a significant effect on reducing your bounce rate.

Visitors also tend to bounce when they are not presented with any appealing navigation options.

Every website should always have a visible sticky menu at the top of every page (unless it’s inside a funnel or squeeze page).Click To Tweet

The menu should give visitors the opportunity to learn more about the business, view other content, contact the website owners, as well as any other website relevant information (e.g. products, podcasts, reviews).

Another reason for high bounce rate is first impressions. If the design of your website is not consumable, unclear or doesn’t make any sense, most of your visitors will bounce immediately.

advertising formulas

People do not like having to do work online. If your website design and format isn’t clean, visitors will see it as outdated, tough to understand and hard work.

Try to minimise large blocks of text, use visuals/images and include white space wherever possible. This will make your website much easier to process and reduce first-impression bounces.Click To Tweet

Fortunately for website owners, technology has advanced to a stage where a page exit (or bounce) can be detected by mouse movement. You should target these users and try to recapture their attention, this can be done with a simple content exit pop, lead gen campaign or a few internal links.

One of our exit pop lead gen campaigns is currently converting at almost 10%, proving that there is still tons of value in exiting visitors.

exit pop conversion rate

But above all else, the best way to reduce bounce rate is to focus on the user (or visitor) experience, that means the combination of everything in this guide (as a whole). Every tiny detail adds up.

^^^That’s 500 words EXACTLY^^^

500 words tick

What did you think about this short 500-word articles about bounce rate? Did you prefer it to our longer guides?

Let me know your opinion.

(I can always extend this guide if you guys didn’t like it!)

If you want to learn more website marketing and management tactics, check out: 

Josh is the Founder of We Imagine Media, an award-winning content marketer, best selling author and creator of the www.joshbarney.blog. He creates and strategises content, sharing the most successful tactics with his lovely audience. He hates writing in the third person, follow him on the social links so he can get back to writing as himself.

2 Responses

  1. All the factors are important to reduce the bounce rate. A user friendly and relevance content plays the biggest role in reducing bounce rate. I always found it helpful to implement things that I liked on other websites. Normally, you know what makes you keep browsing on a site if you really think about it: good place to start!

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