Whether you’re experienced or not, most digital marketers face the problem of a high bounce rate at least once in a while. Even if it’s for a short time, a high bounce can significantly harm your website. It can lead to a drop in sales and reduced website popularity. The term refers to the metric that represents the number of people arriving and immediately leaving your website. People’s attention spans are reducing rapidly, while quality information is increasing on the internet every day. In such a situation, viewers don’t like to waste time on websites that do not deliver what they require. Therefore, it’s your responsibility to make sure that the website is convincing enough to make people stay and reduce bounce rates. However, to accomplish this goal, you’ll need first figure out what’s causing people to leave your website. Here are some common problems that often lead to a high bounce rate.
Slow Loading Times
Slow page loading times are perhaps the most common reason for a high bounce rate. When people visit websites, they expect pages to load almost instantly, within a few seconds. Otherwise, they get frustrated. As a webmaster, it’s your responsibility to give worth to the viewer’s time and improve your website’s loading speeds. However, to better understand bounce rates and solve problems clearly, you should not forget to monitor your web traffic. The amount of web traffic you receive is linked directly to the bounce rate. With real-time tracking of web traffic, you’ll be able to see what’s wrong with your website. A website traffic checker is especially beneficial for this purpose.
Nonetheless, increasing your website’s loading speed is an essential task. Even if your website does not have high bounce rates, they will undoubtedly increase in the coming future if you ignore this task. Websites with a page load speed of 2 seconds have a bounce rate of 9%, while those that take 5 seconds have a 38% bounce rate. The numbers speak for themselves; bounce rate can increase exponentially only because of a few seconds delay.
Low-Quality and Inadequate Content
What attracts people to your website? Simple, the content you provide. After all, be it a product, service, or just information, that’s what people are looking for. However, if your content does not live up to the expectations of people visiting your website, they will eventually go elsewhere. Therefore, you must fill your website with engaging content that users will find interesting.
However, even after creating engaging content, some websites still have a high bounce rate. That is usually because the information provided has numerous errors and lacks research and overall quality. So, make sure you speak to your audience in an engaging tone and give them the information they need. It’s essential to keep updating old content while also generating new content. This ensures that your website has a fresh supply of content that retains people’s attention at all times.
Page Errors
A website may often have everything from high-quality content to a fast-loading speed; however, it still may suffer from high bounce rates. A possible reason for this can be page errors. These occur due to technical problems, such as a malfunction in the JavaScript of your website. When people visit such websites, they face blockage due to errors, such as a 404 error. There’s no doubt in the fact that encountering such errors is quite frustrating. Website owners are usually unaware of these problems, thus end up being confused. However, you can solve this problem by visiting your website like a regular user and look for pages with errors. This is crucial in conducting a thorough website audit to check if everything is functioning as intended. Once you’ve identified such pages, you can quickly fix the code to rectify the problem.
Targeting the Wrong Audience
Believe it or not, some webmasters and marketers actually end up making this mistake time after time! Targeting the wrong audience can easily lead to an insanely high bounce rate. For instance, if your website is related to technology, while your strategies attract a different genre, people will immediately leave after arriving. Therefore, the problem lies in your audience, targeting strategies, like advertisements, content, and backlinks. You need to align all aspects of content creation and marketing into a unified strategy and focus only on the most likely people interested in your website. Unfortunately, discovering this problem can take a lot of time. So, to prevent any delays, keep a check on the effect of your strategies on web traffic.
Lack of Mobile Phone Optimization
Nearly 2 billion people are estimated to use the internet only via smartphones by 2025. This is not to say that people will stop using PCs and web browsers to view websites. However, if your website is not optimized to provide a mobile-friendly experience, it is more likely to be user-unfriendly. Consequently, they will immediately leave the site, resulting in a high bounce rate. Non-mobile-responsive websites don’t load fast, and neither do they look attractive on smart devices. This is because the desktop interface creates issues when squeezed onto the small screen of a phone. So, if you don’t want to lose the attention of more than 2 billion people, test run your website on your smartphone.
Mediocre User Experience
Optimizing your website for an overall high-quality user experience is essential for a decrease in bounce rate. A bad user-interface is perhaps the most significant contributor to a poor user experience. If your website appears to be infested with ads, people are not going to find it attractive. It would help if you created defined areas for advertisements that do not interfere with the CTAs for the user. Furthermore, if your website bombards users with pop-ups and newsletter subscriptions, people will prefer going to other websites.
Another problem that leads to a mediocre user experience is the use of confusing navigation systems. As a result, users find browsing through the website for products, information, or even a check-out point challenging. To solve this problem, use your website by yourself, and see where the interface needs improvement.
Conclusion
Experiencing high bounce rates is pretty much a run-of-the-mill problem for any website owner or marketer. However, the wise choice is not to panic but instead identify the cause of this problem. After all, it’s impossible to solve a problem without knowing what causes it!
