9 Expert Tips for Reducing Your Bounce Rate
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There are over 1.7 billion websites online as of last year. If your site isn’t eye-catching enough or has certain defects, it could be enough to make your users bounce and go to a competitor’s site. This is bad for your business and bad for your SEO.
What is the bounce rate? Put simply, your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your site who visit your site and then leave without visiting any new pages. They bounce off the first page they come to and don’t go any further into your site.
As well as giving you fewer opportunities to market to customers, a high bounce rate can spell serious trouble for your site’s ranking in search results. Google will assume that as users aren’t staying on your site, your site isn’t authoritative and thus, isn’t worth a high ranking.
In this guide, we’re going to take a look at smart ways your site can reduce its bounce rate. These will enhance your website, boost your SEO, and may help your business win more customers.
Ready to learn more? Keep reading!
1. Page Speed
Does your site take a while to load? If it does, you’re probably increasing your bounce rate. Put yourself in their shoes: if a site is taking an age to load, wouldn’t you back out and find a similar site in the search results?
Slow pages are frustrating and if one page took a long time to load, the chances of them wanting to load another page on your site are slim. Page speed also directly impacts your SEO. Page speed is of vital importance and it’s something that’s not too hard to improve.
One of the best ways to boost your page speed is by buying better hosting. Shared hosting, where many websites are hosted on one server, will always be slower than dedicated hosting.
Your page’s elements also affect speed a lot: are you using uncompressed images on your page? Do you have a lot of scripts running on your site? Do you use a minimalist design or something that’s much more complex?
For best results, use dedicated hosting, give your website a lightweight design, and compress your images down from their huge originals.
