One of the biggest questions that digital business owners have is, ‘why does my website have such high bounce rate?’ Although there is no secret formula that will instantly improve your bounce rate, there are a few factors that might be the driving factors behind the it. Here, we have listed some of the most crucial elements that affect your bounce rate. Let’s get started:
Slow page load times
If a user lands on your website and it takes time to load or simply prompt the ‘please wait while the website is loading’ message, it gives a bad first impressions. Just like they say, First impression is the last impression, website visitors might simply click on the back button. As the number of websites has increased tremendously, people expect only the best. It is important that all the elements of your website load properly so that the user can get the full experience. Generally, if a website takes longer than 3 seconds to load – it means you have a slow page load time. As people might get frustrated, they will simply press the back button and thereof the bounce rate would increase.
There are a number of reasons for slow page load time like too many images to load at the beginning, cheap hosting services and a lot of complex animations and font styles.
Non-responsiveness
In this time and age, at least 50% of the total website traffic is coming from mobile phones. If your website does not have a responsive design, you will end up losing 50% of the potential customers/clients. When a website is not designed for smart phones, tablets and difference screen sizes – the elements do not load efficiently. This results in the visitor simply switching to another website that offers a responsive design.
When getting the website designed, ensure that it has a design that is responsive so that it works perfectly with any screen size and resolutions.
Wrong audience
One of the reasons why website bounce rate can be high is that you have not done the right targeting. If you have optimized your website on the wrong keywords and your website starts ranking, all the effort will go to waste. If your website is about IT services but you rank for design keywords, people will come to your website and immediately close the tab. This will increase your bounce rate significantly. When asking the SEO team to optimize your website, it is crucial that they do for the right keywords and terms.
Poor grammar and spelling mistakes
Of course, you didn’t hire a child to write your content but spelling mistakes are inevitable and it’s fine if they’re followed by proofreading instead of a direct click on the publish button. Remember that spelling mistake or poor grammar will take the visitor out of your website like taking out a hair from smooth butter. So, give more time to proofreading than your give to your content creation.