The dreaded high bounce rate. It makes the shoulders of online marketers tense up and causes their foreheads to wrinkle up with concern.
What Is Bounce Rate?
As a refresher, bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that leave your website (or “bounce” back to the search results or referring website) after viewing only one page on your site.
Before you start worrying, consider that “high” is a relative term.
Most websites will see bounce rates between 26% to 70%, according to a RocketFuel study.
Based on the data they gathered, they provided a bounce rate grading system of sorts:
- 25% or lower: Something is probably broken
- 26-40%: Excellent
- 41-55%: Average
- 56-70%: Higher than normal, but could make sense depending on the website
- 70% or higher: Bad and/or something is probably broken
The overall bounce rate for your site will live in the Audience Overview tab of Google Analytics.
You can find your bounce rate for individual channels and pages in the behavior column of most views in Google Analytics.
There are a number of reasons your website can have a high bounce rate.
Let’s review 10 common ones and how to fix them.
1. Slow-to-Load Page
Site speed is part of Google’s ranking algorithm, so it’s just good SEO to focus on it.
Google wants to promote content that provides a positive experience for users, and they recognize that a slow site can provide a poor experience.
If your page takes longer than a few seconds to load, your visitors may get fed up and leave.
Fixing site speed is a lifelong journey for most SEO pros and webmasters, but the upside is that with each incremental fix, you should see an incremental boost in speed.
Review your page speed (overall and for individual pages) using tools like:
- Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Pingdom.
- GTMetrix.
They’ll offer you recommendations specific to your site, such as compressing your images, reducing third-party scripts, and leveraging browser caching. – Read more
