What is a Bounce Rate?
A bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors that leave your website without taking a specific action. Such actions can include visisting a second page, clicking a link, entering information into a form, or buying a product.
Understanding your bounce rate is very important because it can tell you how engaged your users are. Understanding your bounce rate can help you make decisions about things like site performance and site content. An abnoramlly high bounce rate can mean that something is lacking.
What is a Good Bounce Rate?
With bounce rates, the lower the percentage the better. However, what is a good bounce rate is heavily dependent on a few things. For example, recipe focused site is typically going to have a higher bounce rate, this is because many users will come to cook a specific recipe in mind and therefore will only view that one page. Conversely, an e-commerce site will typically have a much lower bounce rate since there are more actions for users to take, such as clicking on products and searching page to page to find products or act on the purchase.
Average bounce rates for blogs tend to be in the 50-70% range. The best way to measure your bounce rate is to find your benchmark. Once you have determined a suitable benchmark for your site, work to lower it where you can and keep an eye out for any sudden, drastic changes, that can indicate an issue.
How to Improve Your Bounce Rate
The first place to look is always load time. If your site is loading too slow this can cause a higher than average bounce rate. Users don’t like sit and wait for a site to load. Make sure that your site’s images are optimized and ads are loading asynchronously. Also, if you have any video content running on the site make sure that it is user initiated. To learn more about site speed, check out our article here.
You may also want to improve your bounce rate by making your content more accessible and responsive, meaning that your pages are easy to navigate for both mobile and desktop devices. Make sure your content is very easy to read, well-written, and split up into short paragraphs with tons of headers and visual content.
Finally make sure that your site encourages engagement. Consider adding a comment section and engage with users when they comment. Place recommendations in conspicuous areas, for example on a recipe site place “similar recipes” close to the recipe card to encourage users to check out additional pages. And make any calls to action clear, like “click here for instructions”, “click here to purchase”.
