Improve your website’s bounce rate with these web programming guidelines
The success of your business website depends on the time your target audience spends on your site. If your website’s bounce rate is high, you need to inspect the reasons and fix them to make your website successful. Your website’s bounce rate can increase depending on a number of web development mistakes. It could be a bad design, a disorganized navigation system, or a longer website load time. Here are some tips for you to lower your website’s bounce rate.
- Check your website design-
- Make your website light
- Simplify the navigation system-
- Tell your visitors what you offer-
- Easy search option-
- Use keywords wisely-
- Do not force registration-
- Avoid popups and use fewer ads.
When a visitor comes to your site for the first time, they place a lot of importance on your design and content. If they like the design of your home page, they will go deeper into your site and explore the services/products you offer.
Therefore, you need to design a professional layout to retain the attention of your visitors. Check the colors, contrast and readability of your site. Poor color schemes and unprofessional fonts can diminish the visual appeal of your website. You should also check your website content for grammatical and spelling errors. Make sure your website design is attractive enough to grab the attention of viewers.
Visitors won’t wait long to see your website. If your website takes too long to appear, they will just skip it. You need to optimize your site for faster page load. Eliminate Flash elements and use fewer images to make your website faster.
Poor navigation is one of the main reasons behind high bounce rate. Always place the main navigation links at the top of the page fold to help your visitors find them easily. If you use a dropdown menu on your site, make sure the main categories and subcategories are positioned correctly in the menu bar.
The call to action button and message should be placed distinctively to grab the attention of the viewers. Do not use more than one call to action per page.
Your target audience reads your “about us” page to get an idea of your business. You must clearly write what products or services you offer and earn the trust of your customers. It may not improve your bounce rate instantly, but a transparent “about us” page helps you establish your brand identity and thus your website’s bounce rate gradually decreases.
You should embed a search tool on your website to make it easy to use. When you have a large eCommerce website of 50-60 pages, your visitors don’t have time to go through all the pages to find their favorite products. The search tool helps them find products instantly and spend more time on your site.
When you write your website content, use relevant keywords in it. Keywords not only improve your search engine rankings, but also help you attract your target audience. When visitors scan your website content and find the right keywords, they know they’ve reached their destination.
Some websites display a registration form as soon as you enter their URL and don’t allow you to access their home page until you register. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. If you force your visitors to sign up, they will simply leave your site.
Pop-ups are extremely irritating and can drive visitors away from your site. Therefore, you must remove all popups from your site.
Ads are one of the main sources of income and if you can’t remove all ads from your site, at least minimize the number of ads to give your website a neat appearance.
You must follow the guidelines mentioned above to improve the bounce rate of your website. However, do not try to make the necessary changes on your own. Hire a professional website development company to make your site user-friendly.