Believe it or not, but your web presence is one the most important aspects of your business or brand. Your website is almost always going to be either the first or second impression someone has of you or your business. That’s why it’s extremely important that the first impression of your website captivates your user.

What is a bounce rate?

Imagine a new potential customer has been told about your product or service and they decide to search for you on the internet and they come across your website. The potential customer is excited that they found your website, they are ready to see what your business or organization is all about and has to offer. They click on your site and… (12 seconds go by) BOUNCE! They clicked out of your site. The user never even made it past the home page. Your user just bounced. Now imagine that happens more often with new users than you want, that would cause you to have a high bounce rate.

Ultimately your bounce rate is the % of users that leave your site without ever visiting more than one page. Having a high bounce rate like 76.24% would be considered a horrible bounce rate. That means that the needs of the people being led to your site are not being met.

How to see your bounce rate?

 Lucky for us there is Google Analytics. After setting up google analytic tracking on your website and gathering data on your site you are able to see you both your site-wide bounce rate and your individual bounce rates by page under the Behaviors section of your dashboard.

Here you can see how well users are engaging with each page of your site and see what pages successful, and which ones should be updated.

What might be causing people to bounce from your site?

Let’s go back to earlier, during those initial 12 seconds where the new customer decided whether they should stay or go. Something about their first impression with your site turned them off. They took one look at your page and couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Why is that?

Here are 5 key reasons that people immediately leave your site:

1. Slow page loading time
2. Nothing inviting to engage with.
3. Your audience can’t find what they are looking for
4. Visitors found the information they wanted right away.
5. Don’t know what to do on your site.

How to reduce the bounce rate on your site?

 Now that you know the 5 key reason people are leaving your site you can take the steps necessary to fix your web presence.

1. First and foremost, make sure your website loads quickly. Nothing makes a user more frustrated and annoyed than seeing the loading meter stop to a standstill while waiting for your site to load. Whenever a site is slow or takes over 5 seconds to load a page, your user has already exited. They never even got the chance to see what your business or organization is all about. Don’t miss out on potential engagement. Reduce image sizes on your website and update to a better, faster and more reliable hosting company.

2. Make your web pages engaging. Add call-to-actions (CTA’s) within your pages and fill your site with relevant and useful content for your audience. 

3. Give them what they want. Your audience is on your site for a reason. They have a need or desire and are searching for a solution. Make sure you show your audience very quickly that you’re addressing the problem they came there to solve. 

4. Leave them wanting more. This mainly applies to the homepage of your website. Sometimes people leave a site because they found the information they were looking for right away and don’t have a reason to browse through your site. Don’t give up all the information up front. This is where ‘Read more’ links, button redirects, and CTA’s come in handy. Give your audience just enough information to capture their attention but leave enough out for them to want to find the rest of the information by going through your site.

5. Last but not least, make sure your site’s functionality and message is simple and clear. If a user visits a site and is not able to figure out how to move through the site than they will be overwhelmed with confusion and leave. This is why it is important to have a clear message, purpose and user-friendly design for your website.