It is believed by digital marketers and business owners that a high bounce rate hurts the website conversion rate as it shows that visitors are leaving the site without spending much time on it before you convert them into customers.

What is Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate can be defined as a single page visit. It’s mean a visitor that lands on your website and decide to leave your site without visiting a second page. If a user spends almost 5 minutes on your site just by reading a single page, it is known as a bounce. It makes one thing clear that if a user successfully finds exactly what he/she is looking for and leaves the site without visiting any other page, it will be counted as a bounce.

Lower bounce rate means more page views, that keep users engaged with your site and generates more revenue as well. A high bounce rate is one of the indicators of poor user experience. So, how you can reduce bounce rate of your website?  

Here we have some tips to improve your bounce rate that really work.

Update your Outdated Content

Whether it is old contact details of the company or a blog post educating people about how they can rank higher in search engines, you need to fix that if you really want to improve your bounce rate. Try to regularly update the old pages with high traffic to provide them with the latest and useful content to keep them engaged. Updating old content consistently shows that you are serious about your business and value the site visitors as well.

Boost Site Speed

The loading speed of your website plays a significant role in making visitors stick around. If your site takes longer to load properly, visitors will become infuriated to leave your site for another one that loads quickly. In this era of mobile technology and high-speed internet, users want any website load within 2 seconds. When a site takes too much to load, they are more likely to bounce for a better option instead of waiting. That is the reason, you should optimize your site for speed in order to provide users with amazing experience. Several online tools are available that can be used to check web site speed. Most of them also provide you with suggestions to boost site speed.

Make User Experience Better with Specific Menus

Menu of your website is called the navigation and is a great source for your visitors they use to steer themselves on the site to find out exactly they need. If they are unable to find something they need like the “Contact Us” page, they are more likely to bounce away without visiting another page. Most of the business owners don’t take the site navigation serious and experience with high bounce rate in their monthly analytics reports. Make sure your site has all the necessary options on the menu such as services, about, contact and blog, etc. You should also add fewer items on the menu to make site navigation easier and effective too. However, you should also test which menu items are needed and used by visitors.

Have a Clear Call to Action

People are busy these days and they decide within moments of landing on the website whether to stay on site or not. That is the reason, a clear call to action can effectively grab their attention to make them stay longer and visit more pages on the site. It will show what you can offer and what they need to do for availing of your offer. Let them know immediately what you are selling as they visit your site right after clicking on an advertisement or link. Also, make sure you are honest about what you offer to prevent people from bouncing away from your site.

Let the External Links Open in a new Window

If you often add external link on your site as reference, make sure they open in new tabs. It will make user stay longer on your site to help you reduce bounce rate. A lot of plugins are available on the web that can make all the external links automatically open in new tabs. If you have a web developer in-house, then you can ask him to set the external links for opening in new tab.

Add more Internal Links

Adding more internal links on your web pages is one of the best ways to reduce bounce rate by keeping people moving around your site. As internal links make the site navigation better and effective, it can also help you rank higher in search engines too. Make sure the links you are adding are most relevant to the page or content in order to provide your users with useful stuff.

Invest in a Great Design

A mobile responsive, simple and appealing design grabs the attention of visitors and makes them stay longer on your website. Simple web design makes the site navigation easier and makes it easy for users to find quickly what exactly they need. Countless ready to use website themes and templates are accessible on the web that not only makes your site’s appearance tempting but also help improve the bounce rate to rank you higher in search engines.