How To Lower Your Bounce Rate

If you have an Ecommerce business, your website exists as a means of converting visitors to buyers. That’s what you want, right? Then why insist on implementing design, content and other things your visitors don’t want, don’t need, and won’t tolerate?

Analyzing the Bounce Rate of the various pages on your website is an excellent way of determining how you can decrease that overall number so your visitors get more out of your home page, product pages, help pages and more.

Identifying Issues That Increase Bounce Rate

Website flaws that contribute to a high bounce rate can mostly be identified immediately, just by looking at the page in question. Is it too long? Is there too much text? Does it load too slow? Most of the time the most obvious issues are going to have the greatest impact when they’re fixed. When you’re ready to dig a little deeper, check out your Web Analytics program to see which of your pages have the lowest bounce rates. I don’t like to worry about those pages that have few views, so it’s better to focus on the more highly-trafficked pages. Why does one page with 1,000 views in a month have a bounce rate of %27 and another with the same views have a bounce rate of 88%? Compare the two and take instruction from the better page.

Specific Contributors To High Bounce Rates

Whether you’re just looking at your page or comparing it against a page that has a lower bounce rate, you’re most likely going to find some common problems that we all experience. They may be easy to fix, or virtually impossible. Regardless of how hard it might be, it’s definitely worth it to go through the effort. Do it yourself or outsource your work to someone who can.

Page Layout and Design can impact your website in a very bad way, if done incorrectly. You want your pages to be light-weight, easy to navigate, easy to extract information from. If users have to scroll down your page through a sea of text to find the sentence that pertains to their issue, you’re probably going to lose them before they ever even get there.

Too Much Text is also a bad thing. You might think your visitors need to know everything about each and every product, but they don’t. Remove blocks of text that you find on all of your product pages, put that block of text on its own page and simply provide a link on each of your pages to that page. You’ll find that your pages are smaller in length, less overwhelming to visitors, and more keyword-dense which is a great positive side-effect.

If you insist that your visitors need to know everything about every product or service on every page, then at least make it easier for them to navigate. I personally like tabbed navigation menu’s for product pages. Tabs for Overview, Specifications, Licensing, Return Policy, so on and so forth. The user simply clicks on the link and the space below the tabbed area is populated with the relevant information. This text is still searchable by spiders but only visible to your visitors if they want it to be. If they don’t care, they don’t click, and they don’t get bogged down.

Page Load Speed is another up-and-coming factor in bounce rate. How long are you willing to sit there and wait for a page to load? Personally, if the page isn’t loaded within about 7 seconds, I’m off and onto the next search result. You can trim your page load time by limiting the number of images, making sure those images aren’t huge, limiting the amount of text, and also limiting the amount of scripts you’ve got running in the background. There are some you can’t do without, sure, but most of them you really don’t need.

There are more factors in a high bounce rate than what I’ve identified above, but if you first address what I’ve laid out, you’ll see your bounce rate drop like a Bear falling out of a tree. Finally, if you’ve got any of these things going on below, remove them immediately!

• Auto-play videos are the most annoying thing in the world. Let me decide to click play. If you just start talking upon page load, it’s taking longer to load. And how do you know I even care what you’ve got to say anyway? If I did, maybe I’d call instead.
• Auto-play Music is just as annoying as above. If I managed to find your auto-body shop online, do you really think I want to hear your Indian Bollywood music? Even if you had Little GTO on loop, I’m moving on.
• Huge Header Logo’s are a massive waste of space and load time. Keep it small. I get that you want your logo to be associated with a peaceful babbling book or whatever, but the whole point of instilling a sense of calm in me is to do it via your layout and content, not by flat out showing me a giant picture of it. See Bing. Pretty pictures are nice but if I want to see them, I know where to find them online.

That was fun. I’m going to do another write-up of things you shouldn’t have on your website because it seems a lot easier to come up with the cons rather than the pro’s. We all love putting the wrong things on our websites and then wonder why nobody likes it. Put the right things on your websites and join me in judging the rest of the web!