Bounce Rates and Reasons Why Visitors Leave Your Website
With the massive amounts of content available on the Internet today, most people skim through website pages quickly. This makes it a challenge to keep visitors on your site for more than a few seconds. Even if your website offers top quality design and content, it may have a high bounce rate. Although the average time that visitors remain on a website was 58 seconds, it has now decreased to less than 15 seconds. For this reason, it is essential today to determine the reasons why visitors leave your site quickly. By checking Google Analytics for your website, you can compare your site’s bounce rate to its normal exit rate, which reveals the basic effectiveness of your site and its pages.
Most experienced web designers and online marketing experts advise that the bounce rate for a site has three separate interpretations:
• The page quality is too low to engage site visitors.
• Your web traffic does not relate to the purpose of your website.
• Your website viewers located the content that they were searching for and left. In this instance, a higher bounce rate is not a negative factor when assessing your site’s overall performance.
Major Reasons Why Visitors Leave Your Website Quickly
If your website currently has a high bounce rate, the reasons why your site visitors tend to leave rapidly most likely include the following:
1. Slow Loading Time. – if your site loads slowly while your competitors’ sites can be accessed faster, your site visitors will usually leave your site for another that offers similar content, products or services. In our fast-paced world today, more than one-half of all web users will only remain on sites that load in under two seconds while 40 percent will exit a loading site after three seconds. Also, sites with fast loading times will gain higher SEO rankings since they offer enhanced user experience.
2. Low Quality Web Content and Design. – The content on your website needs to flow easily, both visually and textually, to accommodate users as they skim your web pages. Your site viewers want to surf seamlessly and rapidly through your content and absorb its meaning and offers. When finished skimming, they should be ready to make an informed decision to purchase a product, join your opt-in email list or register as a member of your site.
According to experts on the “visual hierarchy” of web content, your web pages must be designed so that each visitor knows immediately in what order to read your content. Apparently, most readers will scan a site page with large blocks of text in an F-shaped pattern of eye movement and pages with less text content in a Z-shaped motion. With good quality web design, your visual, textual and interactive page content will have a well organised and highly appealing layout to engage your readers, encouraging them to stay and examine all the pages and features of your site.
3. Auto-Playing Multimedia. – Unfortunately, attractive as they may be, automatically playing multimedia elements on your website will decrease the loading speed of your site. This will undoubtedly increase your site’s bounce rate. Also, by including this automatic element in your web design, you are taking control away from the viewer. Since some of your site visitors may not want to see and/or hear your multimedia content at the moment they access your site, they may leave without viewing your other featured content.
4. Lack of Call-To-Action Buttons. – If your site does not have at least one clearly presented call-to-action button, your visitors will not know in what direction to navigate from your landing page. By including calls-to-action (CTAs), you can direct your visitors to additional content on your site, capturing their attention and interest, which can lead to longer time spent on your web pages. This can also increase conversions significantly. However, landing pages with too many CTAs may annoy your site viewers, resulting in their rapid departures from your site.