If you are struggling with a stubbornly high bounce rate, it’s time to take a serious look at your website and what you need to change. If people aren’t staying on your website, there’s a reason for it. And the good news is that those reasons are almost always problems you can solve. Here are 6 of the most common reasons a website suffers from a high bounce rate:
What Is a High Bounce Rate?
Before you can understand why your bounce rate is what it is, you need to better understand what a bounce rate is and at what point it becomes a problem. So let’s start with a simple definition.
The bounce rate is the rate at which visitors land on your page and then immediately leave without clicking through to visit any other page of your website. In addition to seeing how many visitors are leaving after visiting only one page, you can also track how long they stayed on that particular page before bouncing.
That second metric helps provide more insight into what is going on behind your bounce rate. If they leave immediately, it is likely an issue with the website itself (such as slow load speed) or the content is not immediately compelling enough. If they are staying awhile and then leaving, it is more likely an issue of not directing them onward to another page or not providing any suggestions of where to go next.
But before you start panicking or making dramatic changes, you should make sure that your bounce rate is actually high. Here’s a basic breakdown of what high, low, and average bounce rates:
- Below 25%: Extremely unlikely. Check whether your tracker is working.
- 26% to 40%: Impressive. Keep it up!
- 41% to 55%: Normal. Nothing to worry about but could make some tweaks to perfect it.
- 56% to 70%: High. Unless you are redirecting visitors on purpose, this is a sign of a problem.
- 70% or above: Very high. Even if you are redirecting on purpose, this is still a sign of a problem.
Use this breakdown as a rule of thumb for understanding where your website is in terms of bounce rate. And remember to check these metrics for each page of your website.
#1 You Might Be Redirecting Them
A visitor leaving your website after only visiting the page they landed on is not always a bad thing. In some cases, it’s a result of your particular strategy. Your landing page may be directing them to a 1-800 number or a sales page on another domain. In this case, you may not need to do anything about your bounce rate.
However, if you are hoping to increase the amount of traffic on the rest of your website, you may want to reconsider your strategy of immediately redirecting them off of your website.
#2 You Aren’t Using Data
Your entire online strategy needs to be based on data. You need to find out which pages and what content your visitors like and which ones they don’t. Then, you need to strip away the content that’s not working and replace it with optimized content based on that data.
One of the most common problems for people with new websites is that they don’t yet know what data is available or how to make use of it in order to optimize their landing pages and other pages. Learning how to measure and interpret your data will give you the insights you need to identify what is keeping people away from your website.
#3 Your Page Loads to Slowly
No matter how great your content is, the page needs to load in a reasonable time for people to read it. Users have increasingly come to expect rapid load speeds. Your page should load in a matter of seconds. Otherwise, visitors will get impatient and leave.
Check your page speed regularly and make adjustments to help speed things up. That can be done in a lot of ways including compressing your images or minimizing third-party scripts.
There are other technical issues aside from low page speed that could be causing the problem as well. For example, visitors could be getting an error message or a blank page. Make sure your website is actually working properly before you overhaul the content itself.
#4 Landing Page Doesn’t Match
If the link the visitor clicked on promised information about a certain product or topic, the landing page they arrive at should be that promised information. If you just take them to a home page or to a form to fill out, they are likely going to bounce. Your landing page needs to fulfill their expectations.
#5 You Don’t Have Internal Links
If the visitor lands on a page of content, reads through it, and then doesn’t know what else your website has to offer or what additional information they can learn, they’ll just leave. If you embed internal links into the content or suggest another page of your site at the end (or along the margins), you are more likely to hold their interest and keep them on your website.
#6 Bad Content
If everything else looks good then the problem might just be the content itself. Not everybody is a great writer and content writing requires a certain awareness of things like SEO as well as what your target consumer actually wants to read. So take a good, hard look at your content.
Have you optimized it for Google’s search algorithms? Did you do that without sacrificing the readability for your human audience? Have you provided helpful or compelling content that people would actually want to read? Quality content is key and if yours isn’t up to standard, it’s doing more harm than good.
No matter how great your content is, the page needs to load in a reasonable time for people to read it. Users have increasingly come to expect rapid load speeds. Your page should load in a matter of seconds. Otherwise, visitors will get impatient and leave.