What is a bounce rate?
One way to measure the success of your website is by looking at its bounce rate. This tells you how many visitors leave after just viewing one page on your site, which could be an indicator that there may not have been enough content or interest for them to stay around longer than needed if it’s low-quality material.”
Based on a RocketFuel study, Bounce rates between:
- 40% or lower = Excellent
- 41 – 55% = Average
- 56 – 70% = Higher than normal, but could make sense depending on the website
- 70% or higher = Bad and/or something is probably broken
Why is your bounce rate so high? Here, we can take a look at the most common reasons for leaving an internet page and some solutions that might help you keep potential customers on-site.
1. Slow loading speed
Google has made it its mission to provide a positive user experience for web pages. Google wants to promote content that provides a positive experience for users, and they recognize that a slow site can provide a poor experience. If a page takes longer than four seconds to load, you can wave goodbye to most visitors. Ideally, your page load speed should be under two seconds. These are a few things that can slow down a webpage:
- Too many HTTP requests (Javascript)
- Excessively large images
- Slow hosting service
- Large amounts of unoptimized images
- The use of custom fonts
2. Misleading Title Tag and/or Meta Description
Your page’s meta title tag and meta description play a major role in getting people from a search engine to your site. If visitors enter your site thinking your content is about one thing, only to find that it isn’t, then they will bounce back to whence they came. Make sure to review the content of your page and adjust the title tag and meta description accordingly or rewrite the content to address the search queries you want to attract visitors for.
3. Low-Quality or Under Optimized Content
Content matters. Visitors may be bouncing from your website because of poor-quality, unhelpful content that doesn’t address visitors’ needs or answer their questions adequately enough to keep them on the site long enough for you to make a good impression. It is important to have the information that visitors are looking for directly visible on the site immediately, so don’t let banners push important info down too far! Images are also distractions if they are not related to the content.
4. Bad user experience (UX)
UX is all about creating a site that provides meaningful and relevant experiences for users. It’s unpleasant or difficult sites like these that can make a visitor bounce quickly without hesitation, so it’s important to keep your interface clean with no clutter whatsoever!
5. Self-Sufficient Content
Sometimes your content is so well-written and engaging that people can quickly get what they need from it and bounce! This can be a wonderful thing, especially if you’ve achieved the goal of making your users stay as long on a page without getting bored or distracted by ads.
Perhaps you’ve achieved the content marketer’s dream and created awesome content that wholly consumed them for a handful of minutes in their lives. Or perhaps you have a landing page that only requires the user to complete a short lead form.
To determine whether bounce rate is nothing to worry about, you’ll want to look at the Time Spent on Page and Average Session Duration metrics in Google Analytics.
A high bounce rate doesn’t mean the end of the world. Some well-designed, beautiful web pages have high bounce rates.
Bounce rates can be a measure of how well your site is performing but if you don’t tackle them with nuance, they can become a vanity metric. Don’t present bounce rates without context. Sometimes you want a medium to high bounce rate.
Of course, if you need help with your website, you can contact us, The Recipe ltd. We are a creative digital marketing agency that strives for innovation in every project we take on. From website design to social media campaigns, The Recipe has what it takes to make your brand stand out among others online!