How to Reduce Bounce Rate on Your Website

The bounce rate. It is the rate you never want to bounce too high. Most basically defined, a bounce is when a website receives a visitor who clicks away without exploring any further pages besides the landing page. As you might expect then, it is an important concept for anyone interested in creating a successful website, something which is essential for any success in ecommerce. 

In fact, there are entire website services devoted to minimizing a website’s bounce rate. Nevertheless, you can take steps to reduce the bounce yourself, too. 

Even if you can afford the professionals though, learning about bounce rate and how to minimize it is simply good sense for anybody running a business. But to do that, you need to first learn about the phenomenon of “clicking away” or “bouncing”. 

What Makes People Click Away?

The first and most obvious reason why a visitor to a website might immediately click away is the website itself simply isn’t up to much. If the clicking away is immediate, then it is likely an aesthetic issue is to blame. 

A website can be wieldy and offer lots of great content, but it can also just look bad. We cannot give advice on how it should look (that depends on what type of website it is) but a little research in this direction is the best place to start when it comes to minimizing bounce rate. 

Nonetheless, people could be clicking away because of a marketing and branding problem. To understand this, it is important to know where the visitors are coming from. If your marketing is imprecise and your branding unclear – or if your marketing is appearing in the wrong places – then you could be attracting the wrong visitors. 

Before doing anything else, you need to know why people are clicking away. If you misidentify the reason, your efforts to correct it could come to nothing. 

What’s a Good Bounce Rate? 

The bounce rate isn’t just a concept, it’s actually a figure that can be numerically expressed, specifically with a percentage. A bounce rate of 50% quite simply means that half of the visitors who land on the site are clicking away. 

So, what bounce rate should you aim for? Answering that takes serious analysis of your company. Some companies might be perfectly happy with a bounce rate of 60%; others might justifiably find that figure horrific. 

Azola Creative are a company offering lead generation, website design, and SEO services. They say that, across the board, a bounce rate of between 50% and 70% is the average. But again, it depends on the website and the company. 

Tips for Reducing Bounce Rate 

So, once you understand it, it’s time to reduce it. Here follows some tips:

Make Sure Your Website is Responsive 

This truly is one of the biggest killers where bounce rate is concerned. If your website doesn’t load in three seconds, most visitors will click away. 

Include CTAs 

One way to keep a visitor on your site once they are there is to encourage some kind of interaction. Whether it’s an email mailing list sign up, a subscription, a free trial, or just a help chat, including clear CTAs on your site is sure to minimize bounce rate. 

Consider Your Landing Pages 

Yes, “pages” plural. The homepage is not always the entry point for a website. A visitor might have clicked onto a product page or a blog post. You should consider these landing pages and develop them accordingly. Website analytics should tell you what pages these are. 

In the end, every bounced visitor is a missed opportunity, and possibly a missed sale.