Cut bounce rate in half and improve website speed
We all know that high bounce rates are something no website owner wants to see. This is because bounce rate directly reflects your ability to engage a web surfer beyond your first page. If users are deflecting from your site without choosing to journey beyond the first or second page, chances are they’re not going to be influenced or buy what you’re putting out there. While there are many aspects of a website that can impact its bounce rate, speed has proven to be of utmost importance. Research shows that the average user expects a website to load in under 3 seconds, highlighting their desire for a more expedient web experience that doesn’t eat up their precious time.
That’s why increasing your site’s speed to help lower its bounce rate should be a key aspect of any website owner’s strategy. Let’s look at four key speed elements that you can implement into your website’s development and design.
1. Optimize page load time
Research shows that 53% of visitors will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. What’s the simple solution? Make it fast. Where does one start? Google has a fantastic tool called PageSpeed Insights that provides a detailed breakdown of how your website is performing. A score above 90 indicates your website is performing optimally and certainly better than the majority of sites out there. A lightning fast website platform technology is the easiest way to improve your Google PageSpeed score. If that’s not an option, try making changes recommended by Google to make your website faster.
2. Enhance the UX
Every website owner’s goal is to create an online presence that generates interest in what they’re offering. Unfortunately, this goal is often marred by a plethora of website features meant to give benefits to the owner but, in reality, are lowering the value delivered to visitors and, as a result, pushing them to leave. Bombarding people with ads, pop-up surveys, email subscribe buttons, or CTA-heavy features are just a few examples of elements that can impact a simple and efficient user experience. Understanding how each of these features directly impact your website can be difficult. That’s why there are speed-oriented vendors who provide out-of-the-box web design templates that prioritize UX. These templates capture a website’s core components without compromising the speed, quality, and overall experiences. The value of improving your UX is that you can potentially extend the user journey, with users spending more time on your pages, thereby reducing your bounce rate.
3. Optimize website media
Everybody wants to provide a rich and visually engaging experience to their visitors, but at what cost? Website media is a major contributor to memory consumption, forcing a website to run at a sluggish pace, and leading to a higher number of exits. To improve this, many experts will tell you to scale back on the media you’re using, which might make your website faster but often lowers the quality of the experience you’re trying to create. Taking the time to optimize each piece of media and understand how it will impact your site’s performance requires a lot of time and effort. Some website platforms are equipped with technology that automatically optimizes your website’s media. What’s even better is that they don’t limit the amount of media you want to include, making it easier to build your website without compromising the experience.
4. Make your page mobile-friendly
More than 70% of web traffic comes from mobile. ince mobile has become the medium for web surfing, it is just as important, if not more, to ensure the speed of your website’s mobile performance is optimized. One study in 2008 found that almost 25% of the top websites were not mobile-friendly. When your website doesn’t look good on mobile, users will leave. That’s why a website’s mobile experience must be prioritized from the onset and continuously monitored alongside its desktop counterpart. Implementing a design strategy or website technology that incorporates a mobile-first approach and enhances the mobile experience is guaranteed to pay dividends to website owners; reducing the bounce rates is one of these gains. Some design solutions to consider include using a platform that allows for responsive design, reducing “code bloat” (excess code that can weigh down your site), and as mentioned in the previous point, optimizing website media.
A website’s bounce rates are an important indicator of why they are not gaining traction in the marketplace or generating revenue. By leveraging some of these tactics, a website owner can lower their bounce rates and deliver an experience that meets the needs of their business and their users.
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