How To Improve Your Bounce Rate

So you've set up your website, you've worked hard on getting the perfect looking theme, nice clean images and lots of nice useful widgets. So why are your visitors bouncing almost immediately?

This can be a wake up call to many new webmasters who have the mentality of "if you build it they will come". in order for your website to succeed you must think about what your visitors want and how you can give it to them in the fastest, cleanest, easiest possible way.

I will go over a few basic ways of improving your site and hopefully making sure your visitors stick around to read your content or buy what your selling ;)

Compatibility
Have you checked your websites layout on all possible devices and browsers? Your site may look great on your laptop screen but do you know what it looks like on a brand new iphone? How about an older tablet or a large 4k desktop screen? You can test your website on 100s of different devices by using the browser stack website

Speed Test
It's 2018 and no one has time to wait for your website to load, its much easier to hit that back button and visit your competitor. Most web visitors dont even remember the days of a dial up modem and waiting a few minutes for yahoo news to load up. Using the excellent website https://gtmetrix.com will let you see exactly what loads and in what order. You can then use a plugin like W3total cache to start to combine and minimize your content to serve it as fast as possible. Google will also take into consideration your site speed time, slower load times means a lower search engine position!

Layout
I know It's hard to take criticism, especially after you've spent countless hours tweaking your websites theme and layout but what do your visitors think? By installing a small script in your themes header you can actually track what visitors are doing on your page. You can see where they scroll, what they click all recorded in a nice video. https://www.hotjar.com are the leading experts in this field (you'll find many major brands running this already) I would recommend letting this run for a week and watching the clips to see where visitors are going. Adjust your menu / widgets / content accordingly. This can be a great help for people who are running banner advertising or need to know why people arnt hitting that call to action button!

These 3 small changes can drastically improve most websites. Its very easily to overlook tweaking your site to improve on page time and its worth doing every 6 months or so to make sure your site is evolving with peoples tastes.