3 reasons why your bounce rate is skyrocketing

You’ve built a website that looks perfect, but you’re noticing that your visitors aren’t staying and are skyrocketing your bounce rate?

In this article, we’ll look at the three main reasons why visitors leave your website, and give you some tips on how to remedy the problem.

Before getting to the heart of the matter, a quick reminder of what bounce rate is:

The bounce rate indicates the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing a single page. The higher the bounce rate, the less interested visitors are in your site, and the less time they stay on your pages

Perfect web design

Design problems

If users can’t find what they’re looking for, or if navigating your site is complicated, visitors will leave the page. The bounce rate is then also a good indicator of whether the user journey is working.

In fact, if site navigation is not optimal, if layouts are difficult to read, or if they are too busy or confusing, users may be discouraged and leave the page.

To improve your site’s design, make sure you meet your users’ needs, including working with design methods such as card sorting, personas, user flows and making empaty maps.

Then create an ergonomic design, and make sure your layout is clear and easy to navigate, with explicit calls to action. Also avoid creating too many outbound links or distractions, such as ads or pop-ups.

Read this article to understand how pop-ins or modal windows can be toxic for your website.

Poor quality content

If your page content is of poor quality, uninteresting or irrelevant, users won’t take the time to read you, and bounce rates will increase.

Providing value

To engage visitors it’s important to offer original, innovative content while ensuring that it’s concise and easy to understand.

Images and videos can help make content more appealing, while a neat layout can help hold visitors’ attention.

Engaging visitors with emotions

Content that appeals to positive emotions, such as hope, love or happiness, can be particularly engaging. You can also use interactions and stories to interest your readers through gamification or storytelling techniques. This can be an effective way of captivating visitors and conveying your message in an original and entertaining way.

Long loading times

You know how frustrating it is for users to wait for your page to load.

This can be particularly discouraging… The bounce rate will explode, as visitors leave your site within the first few seconds.

Besides the fact that a slow site will be penalized by Google, too long a loading time can lead to a massive loss of visitors and potential customers.

Why is my site “lagging”?

File weight

If your page contains many images, or if these are not optimized, this can slow down loading time. Always check image sizes on your pages and create custom sizes to limit loading times.

• If your site is in WordPress, use the “add_image_size” function to create different image sizes. By the way, you can install an extension like “Force regenerate thumbnails” which will allow you to update all images in the media library
• Use webp format instead of jpg, this will reduce image weight by 25-34% compared to .jpg and 26% compared to .png.
• Install the webp extension for WordPress which will automatically convert your images and serve a webp version to compatible browsers

The number of server requests

Each time a user accesses your page, the browser sends requests to the server to obtain the various elements of the page. The more requests there are to process, the longer it takes. To improve your site’s performance, consider using a caching plugin like WPRocket, which will store pages in memory and thus reduce the number of server requests.

A cache plugin will also optimize site files and code, offering features such as compression, minification, lazy loading or integration with Cloudflare.

To take query optimization a step further, offload unnecessary resources with a plugin like WP asset clean up. This extension lets you selectively disable or delete unused files, which can improve your site’s performance and reduce its loading time.

Hosting quality

If your site is hosted on a server that is under-performing or under-resourced, this can result in slow load times and reduced uptime.

For WordPress sites, investing in a quality hosting package such as those from WPEngine or WPserver will have a direct impact on load times, whether for the frontend or site administration.

In addition, quality hosting is essential to guarantee high availability and avoid disruptions. A site that is too often unavailable will be frustrating for users. Let’s not forget security either, as this type of service implements advanced protection measures against attacks and viruses.

Lack of trust

If your site doesn’t reassure visitors with the quality of its design, and if it lacks credibility due to display or security issues, users will soon leave.

To show that your site is reliable and secure, make sure there are no display bugs or out-of-date information. Also make sure you have a valid SSL certificate. Your credibility and brand image are at stake.

To further reassure your visitors, display positive customer reviews and trusted logos, such as those of certifications or partnerships, to show that your products and services are reliable and recognized.

In conclusion, it’s important to understand that it’s very easy to lose visitors’ attention. Design, load times and your brand image are all decisive criteria for your users’ experience, and all reasons for them to leave your site

By improving these different aspects, you’ll be able to improve your site’s bounce rate and reconnect with your audience.