Decreasing your Website Bounce Rate

Posted by David | Filed under Web Design Tips

As with many web designers these days, building a website is not just about getting as many hits as you can, but attracting online guests to stay on your website for as long as possible, clicking through and visiting other pages other than the one they found your site through. Up until recently I had quite a high (poor) bounce rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate is when a person visits your website through a search engine or another sites, then after one page view leaves your website. You may argue that you have provided them with all the relevant information and they have no more reason to be on your website! If this is the case, then that’s fair enough, certain websites will be like this. However many websites are not!

What is a Good Bounce Rate?

Well it will differ form website to website but the lower the better! If you have a bounce rate of 0% with healthy visitor numbers you are clearly doing the right thing! I would say somewhere between 25-50 is also fine especially for a website receiving a significant number of visitors. Above 50% start thinking why this is, there may be logical reasons for it, it may be because your site needs a layout or navigation change, or your content just doesn’t keep the reader interested!

Here are a few tips to decrease your website bounce rate!

  • First things first, get yourself Google Analytics or another statistics provider that can identify a range of features such as bounce rate and which pages are suffering from it more than others. Pages that have the highest bounce rate ar either less related to the content of your website, or are poorly constructed, having misleading search terms or simply discourage the user from exploring your website further.

We must therefore ensure our page titles and description are honest and relate exactly to the content of the page. If a user searches for X and finds information on Y they are most likely not to be impressed and will leave your website.

  • An important way to get your users to continue exploring is to actually give them suggestions of what to explore, a good way of doing this is with Related Posts/Pages. I have these on the top right hand corner of my website and below each article, so my guests are able to see that I have other interesting articles on similar topics they might find interesting. This may seem like a laborious process but if you are using WordPress there are plugins such as Yet Another Related Post Plugin which work really smoothly.

After installing this plugin I have found bounce rates dropping quite significantly, and my users searching through 2-5 pages before finally exiting the website. Often I now have visitors spending a good 5-10 minutes surfing the site a great improvement to the previous less than 1 minute statistics!

  • Other useful ways to decrease bounce rate include hyperlinking to your other articles within an article, I frequently do this when I wish to give the user more information on a certain topic.

Remember that it is also important to maintain a users attention, you can do this via using tables, images, bullet points etc to prevent a user losing interest during an article. I would recommend also not having articles beyond around 500-1000 words in length, why not split these up and have a series of articles on a topic! Keep your website readable and friendly to the user, don’t throw adverts in their faces, or unrelated content. Honesty is key to keeping your users as well as GOOD content and GOOD layout/navigation.

  • My final recommendation is perhaps a little annoying for users, but frequently I will not link to external sources I mention, such as if I review a website, and if I do I will only do so at the end of the article. This way a user is more likely to read through my article before leaving the site, I also ensure all external links open in new windows so that my site isn’t closed down when the new one is open.

There are many many other ways to decrease bounce rate, if you have any ideas do suggest them below!

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Permalink | Comments (0) | Wednesday, 27th Aug 2008

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