UX Tweakie

A spiffy blog about ux, web marketing and developement

20 effective ways to fight a high bounce rate

Feb 21st, 12 24 Comments

How to reduce the bounce rate for your website

Just stop it will ya!

Want your vis­i­tors to not leave your site in the door way and stay a lit­tle longer. Good. Then this text is ded­i­cated for you. 

The Bounce rate is a way to mea­sure how effec­tive an entry page is at mak­ing a new vis­i­tor stay on your site. The rea­sons why we want to keep the bounce rate low could be for exam­ple if a vis­i­tor enters our home page we want him to dig deeper into our con­tent because we want him to find and accom­plish the tasks he was there for. If he just enters the home page and then quickly leaves it could be a sign that the con­tent he was look­ing for wasn’t easy to find or, if you’re run­ning a blog with ads you maybe want the vis­i­tor to view a lot of pages in order to expose him to a lot of ads so you could make more money. You also want to expose the vis­i­tor to your awe­some con­tent in order to make him want to come back again. 

There are a lot of ways to opti­mize your web site in order to fight the bounce rate. The fol­low­ing list is some­what geared towards blogs but you could eas­ily switch the word “blog” to “prod­uct page” if that fits your site better. 

Here’s the list:

  1. Offer con­tent above the fold

    Make sure your vis­i­tors don’t need to scroll down to start con­sum­ing the content.  

  2. Focus on the content

    Offer a clear, non dis­tract­ing read­ing environment.  

  3. Be read­able

    Make sure the con­tent is easy to scan and com­pre­hend. Use inter­est­ing and clear head­lines, bul­let points, quouts and images.

  4. Place an inter­nal search form at the top of the page

    If the vis­i­tor doesn’t think that the page deliver exactly what he was look­ing for make sure it easy to explore the rest of the web site by putting the inter­nal site search in an easy to reach area. 

  5. Pro­mote related content

    This is highly effec­tive and there are a lot of ways to pro­mote and cre­ate  related con­tent such as:

    • Cross link­ing inside or out­side the article.
    • List sim­i­lar posts / forum top­ics and discussions
    • List rec­om­mended read­ing (ex more or less advanced instruc­tions about a subject)
    • Use related cat­e­gory and tags links
    • Cre­ate a related biog­ra­phy and fact pages about the subject
    • Use bread­crumbs in order to let the user travel one level up in the hierarchy. 

  6. Pop­u­lar posts

    Show pop­u­lar posts next to the article. 

  7. Recent arti­cles

    Show recent posts next to the arti­cle to let the vis­i­tor dis­cover fresh content.   

  8. Pro­moted content

    Some­times just show­ing auto­gen­er­ated pop­u­lar or related con­tent is good enought. Some­times it’s bet­ter to man­u­ally pro­mote it your­self. Pro­moted con­tent could be sin­gle posts, themes or categories 

  9. Inter­ac­tive articles

    Drag your vis­i­tors into the con­tent by offer­ing them stuff to inter­act with. Inter­ac­tive arti­cles could be con­tests, polls, quizzes, open ques­tions and such. 

  10. Use post excerpts for cat­e­gory pages

    Offer the vis­i­tors only a glimpse of your con­tent by not pub­lish­ing full posts on cat­e­gory pages. This approach is more user friendly because it lets the vis­i­tor to browse quickly through your con­tent and there­fore dis­cover more. 

  11. For mul­ti­lin­gual sites — direct peo­ple to their own lan­guage version

    It’s always eas­ier to read and under­stand con­tent writ­ten on your own language.   

  12. Move impor­tant stuff up

    Dont hide or bury related con­tent far down below your blog post. Try to put it as high as pos­si­ble and as close to the con­tent as possible.  

  13. Turn off related Youtube videos

    If you have embed­ded videos from Youtube dis­able the related con­tent that dis­plays after a video clip. If the vis­i­tor clicks on one of the links in the Youtube video he will be directed to Youtube.com and you might lose him forever. 

  14. Don’t use popups

    That stuff scares peo­ple off. Period. 

  15. Peo­ple who read this also read this

    Show a list of other blog posts your users have read after they vis­ited the post.

Related arti­cles around the web about bounce rate:

Do you want to add any more tips? Please use the com­ment sec­tion below. 

Comments

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