Why bounce rate is high

And, you may manage to boost your conversions at the same time. Instead, ensure that you understand your audience fully. Most importantly, do your best to discover why people choose your site over another competing website. If your site is populated with boring, incorrect, messy, or irrelevant content, your visitors will bounce and your conversions will suffer.

Instead, be empathetic with your content and speak to your audience while providing them with the information they need to become happy and loyal customers. That means having a simple but eye-pleasing layout and design, a navigation menu that is quick and easy, and content that is just adequate enough to entice visitors to convert.

If your bounce rates are uncommonly high, it could be that visitors are hitting a roadblock associated with a technical error. Try to see the page with fresh eyes:. If there are errors of any kind, those will need to be taken care of immediately. Your website should load nearly instantly. Anything longer than a few seconds is far too long as far as the Internet is concerned.

If your site is loading too slowly, the platform will give you tips on how to fix it. Even a single second improvement to your site can deliver more traffic and conversions. And the fact is, a faster loading site may be just the thing you need for a lower site-wide bounce rate.

Here are seven steps to take if your bounce rates are suffering and you want to see them as low as possible. Find that page and isolate it. Then, navigate that page like a normal visitor while taking plenty of notes.

Look at the other metrics of the page. How long are people spending on it? Are they achieving their goals despite a high bounce rate? Determine if the page is the best it could be and if your goals as a visitor have been met.

Website recording is a helpful technique that lets you see just how visitors are navigating through your website. Website recordings can help you see where improvements can be made.

This is ideal for any pages that experiencing excessively high bounce rates. Once you have a recording tool installed on your site, return to the page with the highest bounce rate and see how visitors are acting right before they exit.

Heatmaps are another visualization tool that can help you determine what visitors are doing when they land on your website. Using heat indicators, you can see where the most engagement is occurring.

If you notice that the majority of visitors are clicking their cursors in the top right corner, for example, that might be a prime spot for a call-to-action button. That can give you important data you can use to make improvements to the offending pages to potentially lower the bounce rates over time.

With recordings and heatmaps guiding you in your quest to improve your highest bounce rate page, you can potentially experiment with headlines , images, content, CTAs, and other conversion elements. By showing the same page with two alternating headlines to the same audience, you can determine which one is more crowd-pleasing.

You can use these tools to test elements on your website in real time. You can even engage in multivariate testing, which is where you simultaneously test multiple elements to see which ones perform better. This type of testing can help you find the right combination of elements that lower the bounce rate and improve conversions. Comparing before and after snapshots of how visitor behavior has changed is a great way to do this. Give each test and assessment time to yield the proper data.

The key is to go with slow and gradual optimization. Even if your bounce rates begin to fall, your job is not through. Not only that, but your site may need to be altered over time to keep up with the ever-changing needs of your audience.

With enough steady attention, you can keep your bounce rates low, conversions high, and your audience as happy as can be. Crazy Egg was an early innovator of heatmaps technology. They leave. In an online apparel store, visitors will probably shop around for a bit.

The bounce rate there would ideally skew lower. An upward trend is particularly alarming for ecommerce because when users leave the site too quickly, that almost certainly translates to lost sales. Take devices into consideration.

Mobile users are more likely to bounce across the board, so it should reasonably follow that any website with a large, growing percentage of mobile traffic will see a higher bounce rate. Tablets are not especially predictable—sometimes they bounce less than desktop, sometimes more. Generally, expect mobile bounce rates to ring in about 10 to 20 percent higher than desktop. The former hints at a problem with the analytics setup, the latter with the website.

The only times I saw those ranges in this study were on sites with broken analytics implementations. Horrible, right?

Something is scaring people off—it could be bad design, browser compatibility issues, or even a horribly disfigured tracking code. In which case, it is probably time to start working on creating a real website. Great, right? If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. The analytics implementation is almost certainly broken. This could also be because the website is built in a way that forces most users to take at least one action before leaving, e.

Note: The profile pictured above was not a client of ours. Gave me a headache to see it anyway. Look at traffic segments and group content. And you should care about the metric, just not necessarily compared to other websites. By Jay Peyton. What is a good bounce rate? It should reflect quality copywriting that accurately summarizes the landing page. If you make your snippet catchy to attract clicks, then ensure page content meets expectations.

Falling short of expectations makes users feel misled. Bouncing is inevitable. Error and blank pages are a UX nightmare. Most of the time, visitors will bounce off, never to return. Nobody likes landing on an error page, so offer a surprise.

Add a fun message and guide visitors to relevant content. ScreamingFrog and Google Search Console will check how pages are loading. Fix broken links, errors, and troubleshoot blank pages to prevent bouncing. Website crawling will help you detect outdated or unsuitable inbound links.

If this is the case, fix it by asking the author to update or delete the reference. Mobile consumption and distribution peaked this year.