{"id":2672,"date":"2017-10-24T08:55:41","date_gmt":"2017-10-24T15:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/?p=2672"},"modified":"2017-12-03T15:37:23","modified_gmt":"2017-12-03T23:37:23","slug":"how-to-reduce-your-bounce-rate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/how-to-reduce-your-bounce-rate\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Reduce Your Bounce Rate"},"content":{"rendered":"

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You\u2019ve been spending time building your website, creating amazing content and driving visitors through social media. But you\u2019re not making a lot of money. What gives? What are all your visitors up to?<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So you fire up google analytics to take a look and you see something like this in the audience tab.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>\"\"<\/p>\n

That explains why all that traffic isn\u2019t getting you any revenue. So what do you do about it?<\/span><\/p>\n

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Do you actually have a high bounce rate<\/span><\/h2>\n

Bounce rates vary greatly by what kind of site you\u2019re running. The average website sees about 40% bounce rate.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>\"\"<\/p>\n

That\u2019s still pretty high and we\u2019ve worked with a number of websites who have a bounce rate in single digits. So if you\u2019d like to do something about your bounce rate, read on.<\/span><\/p>\n

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What causes a high bounce rate<\/span><\/h2>\n

Spam Traffic<\/span><\/h3>\n

The bounce not be from the traffic you\u2019ve been driving. Your website is frequently crawled by bots – automated computer programs. These can come from a lot of places. Google\u2019s bots crawls your site to read your content and decide where to rank you. Some other bot, made by spammy website owners, are looking for content to scrape. A lot of this bot activity is picked up by Google analytics and can skew your numbers. That\u2019s because a bot can scan your website in less than a second, so it looks like a bounce.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the example below, you can see that certain sources have a very high bounce rate. These are not real visitors and the high numbers have skewed the site average.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>\"\"<\/p>\n

The Fix<\/span><\/h4>\n

To get to the real data you\u2019ll need to identify and filter out the spam traffic.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Broken links<\/span><\/h3>\n

If you\u2019ve been around for a while, chances are you\u2019ve got a few outdated links that no longer work. You might have posted these links somewhere, such as other blogs or in old emails and these links might still be driving traffic.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Since this link is not connected to a page, the visitors will see a 404 page.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing on that page so the visitor has no need to stick around. They\u2019ll leave almost right away and you\u2019ll see that as a bounce. It\u2019s common if you\u2019ve moved to a new domain or did an overhaul of the site.<\/span><\/p>\n

This kind of issue can occur if you moved your website to a new domain or did an overhaul of the site that included changing some of your URLs<\/span><\/p>\n

The Fix<\/span><\/h4>\n

First, you\u2019ll need to retain visitors who land on a 404 page. Start by customizing the 404 page and making it more in line with your brand. Here\u2019s a great example from Lego<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Next add a search bar and some links to pages that visitors are most likely to visit, such as your home page or store.<\/span><\/p>\n

The ultimate goal though is to remove the broken links altogether. You can use\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0Broken Link Check<\/a><\/span>\u00a0need to find the broken links on your website.<\/span><\/p>\n

The real challenge though is finding broken external links \u2013 links from other places that lead to your site, on a page that\u2019s no longer active. To do that, setup Google Search Console to get a list of links that Google experienced errors with on their crawls.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

You can then either contact the website owner and ask them to setup the correct link, or setup a 301 redirect that takes the incorrect URL to the right page. Visitors end up on the page they\u2019re looking for without ever knowing the difference.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Slow loading times<\/span><\/h3>\n

If your website is slow people will leave. It\u2019s really that simple. Wherever they came from, whatever they\u2019re after, your visitors know there\u2019s probably an alternative somewhere on a faster website.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most people won\u2019t wait longer than 2 seconds for your site to load.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Fix<\/span><\/h4>\n

You\u2019ll need to speed up your website. The fastest way is to get a better hosting provider.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can get a little more speed out of your host by eliminating big images and other large files, but at the end of the day the speed of your website depends on how fast the server is.<\/span><\/p>\n

We offer a\u00a0<\/a>really fast hosting package that only costs $1 a month<\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Too many pop-ups and ads<\/span><\/h3>\n

We get it. You need these to generate revenue. We use them too. BUT you might want tone it down a little.\u00a0<\/a>\u00a068% of people<\/a><\/span>\u00a0say they\u2019d gladly block a site from search for having pop-ups and the ad technique has a\u00a073% disapproval rating<\/a><\/span>\u00a0in surveys. People just won\u2019t spend a lot of time on a site where they keep getting bombarded by ads.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t mean you have to remove all your ads, just make them less intrusive and don\u2019t distract visitors from the real reason they\u2019re on the website. Google is also taking steps against websites with intrusive ads by affecting their search rankings, and will be building an adblocker into chrome soon.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Fix<\/span><\/h4>\n

You need to find new ways of displaying your ads and popups. Do some A\/B tests to see what people respond to best.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Autoplay videos<\/span><\/h3>\n

Similar to ads,\u00a0<\/a>autoplay videos<\/a><\/span>\u00a0are just obnoxious. It\u2019s far easier to close to page entirely than try to find a way to shut the video off. 82% of users will close a page because of an autoplay video. They\u2019re intrusive and they contribute to a bad user experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Fix<\/span><\/h4>\n

Make a great thumbnail, write a great headline, include an obvious play button and turn off the autoplay. People who want to see your video will hit play themselves, when they feel like it. This way you won\u2019t lose all the people who don\u2019t want to see it before they get a chance to look at anything else on your website.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Content that\u2019s different from what they expected<\/span><\/h3>\n

If people arrived on your website expecting one thing, only to see something else, they\u2019ll leave.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Fix<\/span><\/h4>\n

Review all your ppc copy and meta tags to make sure it matches with the page.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/h2>\n

Bad web design<\/span><\/h3>\n

On average people spend 5 hours a day on their phones. 1\/3rd<\/span>\u00a0of all shopping is done with mobile devices. If your website is not mobile optimized, you\u2019re creating bad user experience. Bounce rates are 40% higher on mobile than they are on desktop.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Fix<\/span><\/h4>\n

Get a web developer to give your site a makeover as soon as you can.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Your content\u2019s no good.<\/span><\/h3>\n

Bad spelling? Bad formatting? Bad writing?<\/span><\/p>\n

For whatever reason, if your visitors don\u2019t like your content, they\u2019ll just leave, and nothing you can do is going to change that. Not short of writing better content that is.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Fix<\/span><\/h4>\n

Create better content<\/a><\/span>. Take time to edit over everything you\u2019ve created and only publish high quality content that you\u2019re really proud of.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Remember it\u2019s not visitors that make revenue, it\u2019s subscribers. A regular visitor is worth far more than a visitor that came to your site for 5 seconds. Figure out what\u2019s going on and lower your bounce rate today.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  You\u2019ve been spending time building your website, creating amazing content and driving visitors through social media. But you\u2019re not making a lot of money. What gives? What are all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":2673,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[13,67,70],"tags":[57,100,78,49,79,27,77,21],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2672"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2705,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2672\/revisions\/2705"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fastwebhost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}