05 reasons for high website bounce rate

website speed test

 

Bounce rate is the enemy of all websites. You have to make great attempt to drive visitors to site. It would cost you a great sum of money and effort to capture attention of audience in the digital environment, where there are enormous number of websites out there. To have audience fulfil one action, they may need to go through a lot of steps and each step has it own threats. They can leave you at any time.

There are many potential causes for this issue, including both external and internal factors. Audience can be distracted by other factors on the Internet. They may lose interest with your product or find it unsuitable as mentioned in your adverts. Your competitors give more attractive offer. And one of the most popular reasons lies in the problem of your own website:

 

  • Slow loading speed
  • Complex directing pages
  • Unfriendly user experience
  • Or other issues related to website content or design.

In this sharing, VPSTrust will help you figure out the root causes of website bouncing. The solution to alleviate the situation will be shared later in the next article: How to reduce website bounce rate.

 

What’s bounce rate?

Bounce rate is a terminology to indicate a single-page session on your site. In Google Analytics, a bounce is calculated when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other actions during that session.

General speaking, bounce rate is not a good indicators but actually it still depends on the purpose of your page. If it is a landing page with the goal of content display, the you don’t need to be worried if the bounce rate is high. It is similar to single-page session as well. But for those pages which require action or even checkout process, you must keep an eye on bounce rate and take action right away when you find something wrong.

 

What is the causes of bounce rate?

1. Web loading speed

The most common cause of bounce rate is slow loading speed. In the modern society, people become more and more busy and they pay no time to wait. There are many other available choices, it is highly likely for them to quit right away and find another option from your competitors.

  • Choose suitable website hosting

  • Optimize loading speed by compressing image, reducing file size, updating CMS, etc.

(Check out more here: Why your website is frustratingly slow.)

website speed test

Some tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom can help you test your website speed and know its performance.

 

2. Confusing call-to-action

When they feel confused about what they need to do, they will do nothing instead of hitting the close icon. So be careful with your guidance on the page. Stay single-minded in message and goal so that visitors can absorb it with ease. A neat design and simple message is the secret.

 

3. User experience and user interfere

We always call it UX & UI in short. They are the factors which make an impact on visitors’ action unconsciously. User-friendly UX helps facilitate user to finish their expected action seamlessly. Small changes in position or color of an element can deliver a great changes in efficiency.

Carry out user test, analyze and it will let you know which factors need to be changed in design.

 

4. Low quality content

Content is another problem. Title tag, meta tag, headline and body content have their own function and you must be aware about that. They need to skim through the page to know their benefit and decide if they should stay here. Some seconds scrolling down gives them hint to make up their mind. Beside convincing and attractive detailed content, you also need to clearly define role of other titles.

 

5. Referral source

Last but not least, it can be considered as one of the first problem you should probe. What is your referral source? What is the call-to-action placed there? Before investigating the reason of bounce rate, you need to know that whether you attract right target audience. If your CTA and landing page are not matching, there is no reason for them to stay there or trigger any task.