If you’re a website host, it’s important to understand high bounce and its impact on your website performance. A high bounce rate indicates something wrong with your website.
Is your website struggling with a high bounce rate?
If yes!
Don’t panic
Today you’ll know why your website faces a high bounce rate, which will badly affect your online rankings.
Before jumping on to the main reasons, let’s discuss bounce rate. Let’s dive with us:
What Is Bounce Rate?
Website bounce rate indicates the specific percentage of site visitors who leave a website within a few seconds without clicking on any link or CTA.
The below mentioned formula can measure a website’s bounce rate.
Formula of website bounce rate
website bounce rate = single page / total
For example, if 100 users land on your website and 7 leave without triggering another request, your website’s bounce rate is 7%.
Formula of single-page bounce rate
single-page bounce rate= single/1 page/total (starting from the page)
You can measure a website’s single page and website bounce rate to analyze your website performance.
Reasons of High Bounce Rate
A high bounce rate is tormenting for website hosts. The higher the bounce rate, an indication of the higher the number of potential customers lost. It’ll show that visitors think your website has nothing to offer to meet their needs, so without further interaction, they leave. To avoid the possibilities or reasons for high bounce, let’s jump to our main topic, what could be the possible reasons if your website has a high bounce rate? Here we’ll mention a few of them:
Slow-to-Load Page
Website loading speed impacts your website’s online ranking. Google considers a website’s high loading speed as a ranking factor on search engines. Online users are always in a hurry; they don’t have time to wait; according to analysts, a one-second delay can cost you up to 7% on conversion rates. Google analyzed approximately 11 million website pages. Slow-loading website pages directly create a high bounce rate.
Misleading Title Tag and/or Meta Description
Your website is a reflection of the product and services that you are offering to your digital users. It would help if you showcased yourself with relevant title tags and meta descriptions to rank higher on search engines.
To analyze your website, first ask yourself if your website content (title tags, headings, and meta descriptions are up to the mark according to your visitor’s queries. If not, this will cause a high bounce rate on your website.
Review your website content keenly; misleading title tags and meta descriptions confuse your site visitors, provoke them to the left, and move to your competitor’s website.
Blank Page or Technical Error
If your website experiences a high bounce rate, your visitors can trigger to the next because of a blank page or technical error. It’ll be the reason for the down of paid plugin, your site’s JavaScript malfunctioned, website design, and your web page or form not loading.
If you find any errors, they need to be rectified as soon as possible to recover your website ranking.
Bad Link from Another Website
Are you making your utmost effort to upgrade your website from organic search results and still have a high bounce rate from your referral traffic? If yes, it means your referring site is sending you unqualified visitors or the anchor text and context for the link could be misleading.
The main reason is sloppy copywriting; in this context, the publisher linked to your site in the wrong part of the copy or didn’t mean to link to your site at all.
Unfortunately, this unworthy practice badly affects your search engine ranking.
Low-Quality or Under-Optimized Content
Content is king; high-quality content can get a higher ranking on Google search results. On the other hand, low-quality content puts a negative impression on your visitor’s minds. If your website content isn’t attractive and captivating, it’ll not encourage your visitors to check out other pages. This will lead to a high bounce rate.
For example, if you are not placing a call-to-action button on your website, it’ll also increase the bounce rate of your website.
Bad User Interface
UI indicates how your website interacts with your website user. It has nothing to do with beauty or aesthetics – It’s more about usefulness in appropriately delivering your product to your website users.
Several factors have a bad impact on your IU, such as;
- Sluggish, unresponsive, and complicated website design
- Lack of social interaction
- Readability issues
- unreadable content
Above mentioned factors are the main reasons that will cause your website’s high bounce rate.
The Page Isn’t Mobile-Friendly
It’s true only some websites on the internet are mobile-friendly. However, according to the studies, approximately a quarter of the top websites needed mobile-friendly. In addition, websites that have yet to be optimized for mobile don’t look good on mobile devices and don’t load too fast.
There are some common mistakes of non mobile-friendly websites:
- The content is wider than the screen
- Links are too close together
- The text is too small to read
If your website is not mobile-friendly, you may lose your potential customer by a significant margin.
Asking for Too Much
Website safety and credibility are top priorities for visitors. Don’t ask personal questions regarding credit cards and personal content or mail. If you inquire about too many details from your site visitor – your user doesn’t trust you yet. It’s a fact that asking for info will cause many people to leave immediately.
Content Is Poorly Written
Online users are very curious to learn new things. They will only stick around if your content answers their queries. They prefer to move to another site for better content.
If your site is packed with boring, outdated, and irrelevant content, your visitors will bounce, and your conversions will suffer. Don’t underestimate your site visitors; they land on your websites to learn more about a particular subject. They’ll move to another host if you don’t entertain them professionally.
Bad Form
If you are given an option to your site visitor to fill in a web form at the start, it must be short, relevant, and easy to fill in. make possible and easy steps to protect your site visitors’ private information.
Content Is Hard to Read
As we mentioned early, content is king; it must be easy to understand for everyday users. To increase your content readability, compose it in a friendly tone with accessible and relevant vocabulary. If you are publishing hard-to-read content with irrelevant vocabulary, you can only generate leads if you do. However, it’s important to understand relevant and robust content in an easy tone.
No CTA
CTA – refer to call to action. It’s a prompt to get your audience to do something specific. If there is no CTA, your website visitor will leave once she has finished reading.
If you have a co-related product or service related to the content, then clearly link to your product or service page. If you still need to get a co-related product or service that you want to promote, then try linking to related articles that will keep your visitor stuck to your website for a long time. Again, the absence of a CTA strategy will increase your website bounce rate.
Disruptive Advertising Scares Off Visitors
Online users don’t stay on those website pages. They are filled with disruptive advertising elements. Avoid ad formats and focus on delivering relevant content representing your product and services.
Ensure pop-up ads, download videos, or eBooks only appear when your site visitor completes your predefined action on a page or has scrolled down a certain percentage of the page on your site. Descriptive advertising ads annoy site visitors to move forward without making purchases, that’ll cause of high bounce rate.
Page Fails to Meet Visitor Expectations
Site visitors land on your website with certain expectations; if you need help understanding their expectations, they will leave your site within a few seconds.
Nothing is more intimidating than opening a new window of relevant or meaningful content that your site user craves to read.
There are a few elements that will cause it to fail to meet visitors’ expectations, such as;
- Homepage does not carry the Key points menu
- Your webpage takes more time to load
- Pop-up ads drive site visitors to leave
- Unsecure website
- The website is not optimized for mobile access
- Irrelevant, outdated content
- Unattractive website design and layout
All the points mentioned above provoke your site visitors to leave and cause a high bounce rate.
Conclusion
Well-optimized websites or web pages will help to boost your search engine ranking. Slow website speed, unfocused keywords, misleading meta tags, low-quality content, broken backlinks, and website error are all important factors in a high bounce rate.
As we mentioned above, a high bounce rate badly affects your website’s search engine rankings and indicates low business performance.
By rectifying the above-mentioned points, you can improve your overall website performance and ranking in the SERPs.