6 Steps to Reduce Your Bounce Rate [+ Platform-Specific Tips]

Your website bounce rate is a metric that shows the percentage of people who land on one of your websites and then leave again without clicking anywhere else on your website – that is, single page visitors.

How sticky is your website? When visitors bounce, it suggests that they either didn’t find what they were looking for or the page wasn’t user-friendly. A high bounce rate also means that visitors don’t search for more content on your website, click on your calls-to-action, or turn into contacts.

For inbound marketers whose primary goal is to attract website visitors and convert them into highly skilled leads for their sales teams, this is a scary business. So, let’s get into how you can reduce your bounce rates.

Bounce Rate Improvement Infographic

Fortunately, QuickSprout created a great infographic that explains why bounce rate is so important, highlights benchmark industry averages for bounce rate, and shows a variety of changes you can make to reduce your website bounce rate. Listen!

And if you need help converting visitors who are about to bounce off your website, try HubSpot’s free lead capture tool, Lead Flows, to create a call-to-action with a relevant offer that goes through the exit intent is triggered.

Bounce Rate Benchmarks

Having a benchmark is so valuable in trying to understand where you stand compared to competitors in your industry.

Below are some key stats on bounce rates for 2021.

1. Set realistic expectations.

When it comes to your bounce rate, it’s important to set the right expectations. As mentioned in the infographic, consider your historical data as the foundation of your website’s past performance.

Then compare it to the average for your industry and platform.

Let’s say your business is a B2B brand with an average bounce rate of 56%. As shown in the previous section, the average bounce rate across all industries is 47%, so you can tell that your bounce rate is really high.

However, the data also shows that bounce rates for B2B industries are much higher at 75%. So at 56%, your company is actually doing pretty well. While this doesn’t mean that you should stop your efforts to reduce the bounce rate, it is important to know how you compare against benchmarks.

In this case, where you are only competing with yourself, it is time to rely on historical data in your strategy.

2. Attract the right visitors.

Imagine yourself in a grocery store. You look for a certain object and walk down a corridor. You look around and you can’t find it. So what are you doing? Get out of the aisle and ask for help or just try the next one.

Think of your website as an aisle in business. If your content doesn’t suit the visitors you are attracting, they will leave quickly.

So how do you make sure you’re attracting the right visitors?

• Create multiple landing pages with unique content and keywords for your different buyer personas.
• Maintain top rankings for branded terms.
• Write attractive, useful meta descriptions for search engine users.
• Improve online ad campaign targeting.

3. Prioritize the user experience.

Nobody has the patience to navigate a difficult website these days. You only have a few seconds to make a good impression and present a website that users are happy to be on.

To do this, proceed as follows:

• Make your text readable through sensible organization and the use of larger fonts, bullets, white space, good color contrast, and large headings.
• Use well-organized, responsive layouts that make navigation quick and easy across all platforms and browsers.
• Don’t let ads distract you from your content: place static ads on pages and avoid pop-ups and self-loading multimedia ads.

4. Speed ​​up the loading time of your page.

Pagespeed is one of the main reasons website visitors leave a website. In fact, in 2017, Google reported that with page loading times of up to 10 seconds, mobile bounce rates increased by 123%.

Think about it: when was the last time you waited over a minute for a page to load? The first instinct of most users is to leave the website and find another website that suits their needs.

Several factors can contribute to a slow website:

• Self-loading multimedia content.
• Site server

The ideal page load time is two seconds or less. Make sure to test your page speed regularly to make sure it is within this time frame.

5. Create quality content.

Content can improve or affect your website visitor’s experience.

Your content should be:

• engagement – Does your content make your visitors read on?
• Clear – Is your content easy to understand and digest?
• Relevant – Does it answer the question your website visitors are asking? Or is it clickbait (a big no)?

If you’re unsure how to answer these questions, get an objective third-party vendor to review your content. You should also consider hiring a copywriter who is an expert at creating quality content.

6. Monitor, test and optimize.

Any change you make to your website can affect your bounce rate. From the placement of an ad to the content of the page.

With that in mind, you need to closely monitor your website to assess traffic changes. If you notice an increase in your bounce rate and a decrease in visitors, run A / B tests to see which page elements could be affecting your traffic.

Once you identify the problem, optimize your page.

When it comes to bounce rate, there is always room for improvement. Use optimization tools (more on this in the next section) to identify ways to reduce your bounce.

Would you like to start optimizing? Use this checklist to help you maximize your website’s performance.

Here’s how to reduce your Shopify bounce rate

If you run an ecommerce business, monitoring your bounce rate is a priority as increasing it can drastically affect sales.

The first thing you can do to reduce your bounce rate on your Shopify website is to make sure that your search campaign is targeted towards your landing page. That means you need to make sure that the keywords you are targeting match what you are offering on your landing page.

In addition, your landing page should be optimized for conversion by following best practices (e.g. clear CTA, no navigation bar).

The next step is to give your page credibility. You can do this by showing customer reviews and testimonials as social proof. You can also add trustmarks to your website to indicate that you are a legitimate company.

To further improve your site’s performance, add a live chat feature to help website visitors shop. From these interactions, you can gain valuable insights that will help you optimize your site.

Finally, invest in tools like Optimizely, Hotjar, Unbounce and Crazy Egg to better understand the behavior of your visitors on your website and identify areas for improvement.

Here’s how to reduce your blog bounce rate

To reduce your blog bounce rate, you need to follow proven formulas:

• Have a clear structure and page hierarchy – The use of headers and subheaders helps visitors (and search engines) understand what information is on the page and how it is organized.
• Use good quality media – Photos, gifs, illustrations, and videos are great for breaking up long chunks of text and diversifying your information delivery method.
• Make your content error-free – When users see a page full of bugs it can lead them to question the brand’s credibility and lead them to leave the page.
• Include a clear call-to-action – A clear next step for your website visitor will help guide them in the desired direction. Would you like them to read other articles? Link them in your post. Would you like them to download an offer? Include the CTA in the post.

How to reduce email bounce rates

The bounce rates of e-mails are defined differently than the bounce rates of other channels.

An email bounce rate refers to the number of emails that are not delivered to a subscriber list. There are two types of bounce rates: hard and soft. The former refers to a persistent reason why the email could not be delivered, while the latter refers to a temporary problem.

Let’s say you have 100 email subscribers. They send a blast email and 98% of them get your email. Your email bounce rate in this case is 2%.

According to Campaign Monitor, the average bounce rate is 0.7%. However, this number can vary slightly depending on the provider.

A bounce rate between 0 and 2% is normal. Anything beyond that and you’ll want to look deeper.

Here are some ways to reduce your email bounce rate:

• Use double opt-ins – Sending a confirmation email to a recipient with a CTA to subscribe to ensures that the email sent is correct and working properly.
• Regularly clean up your subscriber list – Removing inactive subscribers is another way to verify that your file work email addresses are healthy and active.
• Invest in a reputable email provider – Free sender platforms won’t make it when it comes to email marketing. This means leaving your Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo accounts for personal use and viewing HubSpot, MailChimp, SendinBlue and more.

Design a website with a low bounce rate

A website with a bounce rate requires constant monitoring and maintenance.

By making sure your content is tailored to the needs of your visitors, your content is easy to navigate, and your conversion elements are clear, you can maintain a low bounce rate.

Are you ready to start optimizing your website? Use this checklist as a guide. It contains everything you need to improve your website’s performance, including SEO and security.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2014 and has been updated for completeness.