6 ways to reduce your website bounce rate
Most websites have a shocking 30-60% bounce rate on average. This means a large majority of web traffic entering your website leaves without navigating to any other pages. And many times they may never come back. Yikes!
Here are 6 tips to help improve your web design and usability and reduce your website bounce rate.
1. The First Impression
An in-depth study from the Stanford University and Consumer Web Watch, “How to Do People Evaluate A Website’s Credibility?…,” found that a website’s design was more important than credibility indicators such having a privacy policy, awards or certifications.
According to Beau Brendler, the Director of Consumer Web Watch, “While consumers say they judge on substance, studies demonstrate that consumers judge on aesthetics, and get distracted by bells and whistles.”
So, after spending all this time developing great, valuable content that visitors can’t find anywhere else on the Web, is it still vital to make your design and navigation appealing and consistent.
The Stanford study noted specifically that a site’s design is the first indicator of quality “…the visual design may be the first test of a site’s credibility. If it fails this criterion, Web users are likely to abandon the site and seek other sources of information and services.
Fortunately, we have written a whole blog post on How to Make First Impressions Count which will go into much more detail about what you need to consider here.
2. Maintain Consistency
It’s best to keep elements on your site fairly consistent from page-to-page. Elements include colours, sizes, layout and placement of those elements. Your site needs to have a good flow from page to page. This means that colours are primarily the same as well as fonts and layout structure. Navigation should remain in the same location of your layout throughout your website. If you are unsure how to do this, a company style guide is a good place to start
3. Use the right images
If you can help it or unless it serves a specific purpose, try to resist the temptation to use photos of fake smiling business people! Instead, take care to place meaningful images on your site. Every image is transmitting a subconscious message to your audience and sometimes the result is different from what might expect. We recommend looking into a study by Marketing Experiments “Images vs. Copy: How getting the right balance increased conversion by 29%.”
4. Navigation
More than three-quarters of survey respondents from a recent HubSpot study say that the most important element in website design is ease in finding information.
5. Flash and Animation
Not only do Mobile applications lack the capability to view flash animation but many people simply don’t want to be bothered with unexpected noises and animations. Keep the animation to a minimum and only use when If you’re in love with Flash or require animations, consider moving to HTML5 instead, if applicable. It’s a great browser-compliant alternative to Flash.
6.Accessibility
Make sure that anyone visiting your website can view it no matter what browser or application they are using. In order to gain significant traffic, your site needs to be compatible with multiple browsers and devices. With the growth in mobile phones and tablet devices, people are surfing the internet more than ever before. Make sure to get some of those views by allowing everyone to view your site, no matter what kind of system they run or which browser they use.
