Top 4 Reasons Why Your Website Has A High Bounce Rate

If you've recently been having trouble with high bounce rates on your website and want to lower it, you first need to understand the potential causes that contribute to high website bounce rate.

There's many things that can cause your site's bounce rate to be high, and having a bounce rate above 90% or below 20% might suggest that there's something technically wrong with your website.

That is, from a technical point of view, and you should contact your website developer if that's the case.

In this blog post, I'm going to tell you some of the most popular reasons why your site has a high bounce rate.

What is website bounce rate?

When somebody lands on your website or landing page, and exits or goes to another website almost instantly, this is referred to as the bounce rate of a web page.

It's measured as a percentage, and the higher the percentage, the more people are leaving your website and the lower the percentage, the better.

It can be difficult to keep track of everything that contributes to causing people to leave your website, and could have a negative impact on your site's SEO if they do.

I get it, you've got hundreds of web pages, blog articles and don't know where to start right?

It's challenging at the start when you first create a website and put it live, and chances are, it'll take at least a few months for you to collect enough data through tools like Google Analytics and the Search Console to truly understand whether your site is performing correctly.

That's why, I'll give you the things to check within your site to help you narrow down the potential causes.

How do you fix bounce rate?

Bounce rate is often a challenging metric to analyse and improve without knowing the exact causes of it, so before you even attempt fixing it, you're going to need to know what to look for first.

Sure, I mean you could just go ahead and work on all of the things that could be contributing to a high bounce rate...

But you're likely going to get stuck at some point, stuck in the mud not knowing where to go next.

404 Page Not Found errors

One of the most common reasons for a high bounce rate on your website is going to be down to 404 pages.

You see, when you start your website, you're able to keep track of all of the pages, URLs and permalinks.

But as your website grows, you're going to be adding more and more pages, and even potentially modifying your URL structure.

You'll set up some 301 or 302 redirects, but you might miss a few, resulting in a 404 page not found error for your users.

What's worse, it could be on a page that you rely on for generating new leads, such as a landing page or page promoting a product.

If your users see a 404 page not found error, they're going to leave.

Why?

Well, because they've got no choice, they can't read the content they wanted to, or can't sign up to that all important email list that you've created, so they'll go elsewhere, maybe to the competition.

My advice is to use a broken link checker to find broken links within your website that could lead your users down a funnel to a 404 page.

Low quality content

Your website needs a lot of content.

How much content? Well, as a website owner and business owner you should be creating content that provides as much value as possible to your potential customers.

How many times have you Googled for product reviews and have come across a post such as "the BEST this for that" kind of post...

And you know, just by reading the content that it's terrible.

That nobody is even going to continue reading whatever content is on that page.

Content is king, and Google is always finding new ways to promote those that deliver high quality content for their readers, and demote those who are just writing content for money.

Another problem you could encounter that's related to low quality content is actually having thin content. Thin content is content that has little to no value for the reader.

Google wants websites to have relevant content that matches search intent.

It doesn't mean though that writing a 5,000 word blog article is going to provide more value than an article with far less words, so word length really shouldn't be looked at too seriously here.

Your website isn't responsive

Responsive websites are essential to ensuring that you are building an experience that is accessible for different demographics and different devices.

The majority of websites today are accessed from a smartphone or tablet, and whilst users still do use laptops and computers, in general it's the smartphone they use.

I often use my smartphone to order products online on shops such as Amazon, and I bet you do too.

But if your website isn't responsive, what's going to happen to your bounce rate?

It'll go up.

Why?

Because you're not providing a great user experience for your website visitors. User experience is key to ensuring you're attracting and keeping users on your site and if you're not focusing on continuously improving your user experience, start to see a rise in your site's bounce rate.

You want your users to navigate through your pages, and eventually buy that featured product or subscribe to that service that you offer.

No clear call to action (CTA)

A call to action or CTA is typically a button or element that's obvious to the user that you want them to do something...

Whether that be to click a button, watch a video, like your Facebook or Twitter page or sign up to an email list.

Every web page should have a general theme and call to action that you want them to complete.

For example, on our domain monitor, we want you to sign up, so dotted throughout many pages are clear call to action buttons that make it clear to you that they're there for you to click on and create an account.

If a website such as Samsung didn't have clear call to action buttons, how would they drive up excitement for their new products?

You can have more than one CTA, but ideally you want a primary action, and a secondary action.

Your primary action might be for someone to sign up to your membership area, whilst your secondary action could be to like your Twitter page.

Whatever the CTA is, without one, your bounce rate is for sure going to rise.

Final thoughts

Whether you're a startup, or an existing website trying to scale beyond your current reach, you're only going to be able to do so by getting the bounce rate metric down.

There's many ways to do this, and within this blog post, I've taken you through some of the most essential reasons why your bounce rate might be so high!