Dmitriy N. Full-Stack Developer

How to reduce bounce rate of your website

The percentage of the indicator depends on two key factors:

- number of pages viewed per visit;

- time spent by the user on the site.

This means that in order to reduce the bounce rate, it is necessary to increase user engagement and remove negative factors. And for this, the site must be working, useful, convenient, interesting and attractive.

Now let's go through the check list...

1. Speed ​​up your website loading speed.

2. Make it responsive for mobile devices.

3. Check your navigation. Is it understandable enough?

4. Update outdated content. Regularly update old high-traffic posts.

5. Don't use popups... Unless they're meant to exit.

6. Format the text. Break it up into paragraphs.

7. If your site has international traffic, then you should think about translating the site into other languages.

8. Make site search more visible. There are people who are looking for the search box as soon as they enter the site. Help them.

9. Make your 404 error page more useful for your visitors. If they already got it, then give them a chance to stay on the site.

10. Keep the number of broken links to a minimum.

11. Let all external and some internal links open in a new window.

12. Add more internal links for easy navigation on your site.

13. Invest in a design/redesign.

14. Check cross browser compatibility. Whether the site displays correctly in all popular browsers

If a user visits the page and sees a bunch of text that he has no time to read (and you deleted the photo to reduce the bounce rate), then one person out of ten will certainly try to find the answer in the text ... But the rest will return to the search results again, to find the answer on other sites.

And it will be clear to the search algorithms that your website is not responding to the user's query. Then, most likely, the website will be downgraded in the search results for this query.

It turns out, trying to improve one indicator, you worsen another (more important). So don't lose your head.

It is right to aim for a lower bounce rate, but I advise you to consider this indicator as an integral part of behavioral factors in general.

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