10 Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate of your Website As a webmaster and a small business owner who runs a website, it is not enough that your site gets first time visitors but you also want to make sure that those visits (for which you have worked hard) converts into more meaningful goals, preferably into sales and revenue. Bounce rate can be a good way to measure your traffic quality as well as how targeted your landing pages are. If you are not aware of what bounce rate is, it is percentage of visitors leaving the page immediately after coming to it. For example, if out of 1000 unique visitors 650 are leaving your site immediately, then the bounce rate is 65% which is on higher side. This most likely means that the content is either not relevant or not engaging enough for the visitor to stay or to go to other pages. Normally you don't want the bounce rate to be higher than 30%, this 30% also comes because of search engine traffic where users tends to click on links, open the page and then leaves. To measure your site bounce rate, you can either use google analytics or awstats or any such basic web analytics program. If your bounce rate is > 50%, you should seriously look into your site structure, how content is distributed, how interlinked pages are and most important, how is the quality of the content. Here are 10 such ways to reduce your bounce rate, feel free to add more such methods in comments. 1. Create High Quality and Relevant Content This is no secret, unless the content is not good, you can't stop the visitor leaving the page (and no, those JavaScript pop-up ask multiple times "are you sure" doesn't work too). The best way to reduce bounce rate is to put high quality informative content. 2. Interlink Your Content - HINT: See Wikipedia Do you know how many pages an average visitor of Wikipedia visits ? 5 ? 10 ... well as per wiki stats http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/ it is 20! The biggest reason for such high page views is the interlink nature of wiki pages. Once you start reading and clicking on inks, you will keep on opening pages after pages. Wiki is a great example of how interlink content helps to reduce bounce rate and you too should look to do this. 3. Clean and Responsive Web Design Mobile now accounts for as many page views as PCs and their numbers will only go up, the number one reason on mobile why users click the back button is if the site is not responsive. It is not possible to browse a site with 1200 resolution on a 300 px screen size of mobiles and you should (this is a must nowadays) have a responsive website which is browseable with most of the resolutions of all devices. 4. Make Your Website Load Faster Search engines give a lot of value to the speed of site loading since poor site loading often means poor user experience which makes your site less desirable in search engines eyes. Check our my older post on how to increase your site loading speed and List of 15 sites to check site loading speed. 5. Focus on Site Structured and Navigation Proper site structure, menus and navigation is very important to keep the user attention. If he doesn't find what he is looking for in first few seconds, expect him to leave. Use breadcrumbs (but don't abuse it), have pagers and page navigation (see inboundio blog's home page) as well as use taxonomies and categories to categorize the content. 6. Choose the Right Font Type, Font Size, Color and other HTML Elements Do make sure your site font type, size, colors and various html elements are easy on eye. Don't abuse table tag and span which is often used to change font colors every now and then. Try to find colors using site like colorcombos.com to find right color combinations. 7. Avoid Popups, Signup Pages, "Like us" Features Avoid pop ups, interstitial ads, "like us to view this page", article splitting, too many ads - too many ads, too little content, list spreading to 10 pages, like us on Facebook to see the page, register to see the page are few things which are intrusive and annoying, no one likes them and most often people leave the page immediately. It is understandable if you want something in return from the visitor but it should be on the basis of "give first before taking it" basis. Find the right balance between revenue and user experience. 8. Make Your Content Interactive Static content is good but sometimes you want jazz up the things a little. Try to make the content interactive with embedded files (slides or documents), use forms and polls, take surveys, offer rewards and incentives, use infographics etc for your users. 9. Provide Search Box, Sitemap, Footer Links, Widgets and Custom 404 Page Provide a search box, sitemap, footer links with contact form, Facebook like widget box, custom 404 page - If you have lot of pages, do provide a search box and most often when the user doesn't find what he is looking for, a search box gives him an option to search for what he is looking for. Similarly have a sitemap and contact form linked to footer, it often helps to keep the user stay on the site. You can also have social media widgets on the site/blog sidebar say a quora, Facebook or pinterest widget. Similarly try to have a custom 404 page with a search box in it so if somethings gets broken in future, the visitors can have the option to find the new url of that page. 10. Use Analytics, Find Pages Performing Poorly and Fix Them I uses google analytics to see which pages are having highest bounce rate which can be done by you too. With this, you know the problematic pages which you can fix. If you know more such ways to reduce website bounce rate, do put them in comments and I will add them in the post. Previous Article 10 Ways to Improve User Experience of your website Next Article 45+ Tools to Improve your Conversion Rate with Better Content Marketing Tools