4 Key Reasons Why Your Website Has A High Bounce Rate

Whenever a user visits your site and leaves without navigating to another page is known as a “bounce,”. The percentage of people who only view one page on your site before exiting is known as your bounce rate. The optimum bounce rate hovers around 26 - 40%. The higher the rate, the more potential customers are leaving your site in one click. 

Luckily, there are several reasons why your website could be showing a high bounce rate, most of which are easy to tackle. 

A slow page load time is a prime source of higher bounce rates. Today’s Internet users are impatient, and with every second that ticks past waiting for content to load, the greater the chance that user will go elsewhere.

You can use tools such as Google Search Console page speed reports, Lighthouse reports, or GTmetrix to review the loading times for individual pages and your site as a whole. The tools will provide you with recommendations for improving page speed, such as using smaller image files, reducing the number of redirects, and reducing third-party scripts. 

If your page title and meta description do not accurately represent the content on the page, you might register a higher than necessary bounce rate. This happens because visitors click through from the search results expecting to find the answer to one question, but receive something else, sending them swiftly back to Google to find what they were actually looking for. 

A misleading page title and description may have done deliberately for click-bait or by accident and then not noticed. Whatever the reason, it can drive up bounce rates and give a poor impression of your site. This is easily remedied; simply review all titles and meta descriptions and adjust any inaccurate entries accordingly so that they truly reflect current page content. 

The content on your website itself could send visitors away at first glance. This happens when your content is of a poor quality, written purely for SEO, out of date or lacking in authority, detail or credibility. A content audit can help you to determine whether poor content is driving visitors away. 

Question whether your content is written with your marketing personas in mind, uses the right language and tone of voice and provides enough information to be useful.  

Images, headers, and other page breaks can make your content more visually appealing and easily scannable. If these are lacking, too much text could leave visitors overwhelmed.

Mobile search surpasses desktop search volumes so, if your website is not optimised for mobile use, your site’s bounce rate will bear the brunt of user frustrations. Sites that aren’t mobile-friendly take longer to load and do not look appealing on handheld devices, often causing key information to be hidden below the fold. Poor mobile optimisation is also detrimental to your search rankings so mobile-friendly optimisation will need to take place as a matter of urgency.