The bounce rate is a horrible statistic, let’s admit that. They tell you the percentage of people that bounce straight off your website upon entering onto it. It tells you who is basically coming onto your website, not liking the first impressions of it and exiting straight off it. For this reason, many bloggers deem the bounce rate to be quite a critical statistic to improve since decreasing it will mean more people will stay on your website for longer and potentially look at other pages (which all bloggers will like to achieve). However, to decrease the bounce rate, you need to know why people leave websites. Here are four reasons why people bounce off websites.

Pop-Ups

Pop-ups are extremely annoying. This does not always mean advert pop ups that are spammy – this includes any pop-ups like email marketing pop-ups etc. I understand why some websites use them as it is going to be a great way to get people to sign up to email marketing and so on. However, it is unfair on the web user that they entered onto a website with one thing in mind of reading content etc. and have something pop up in their face asking them to sign on or do something like completely a lead.

Pagination

Pagination is the term used when articles are split up into separate web pages so if the web user wants to read the whole article, they will have to click onto two or more web pages to do so. On the positive side, this really will help your pages per visit and increase the number of pageviews your website gets. However, at the same time, it turns many web users off websites as it takes time to load web pages – it is most annoying when the article is, let’s say, 500 words and pagination is used to split the article into five separate 100 words snippet web pages!

Font

Believe it or not, the font type and size used on websites play a big role in the bounce rate. This is because web users enter onto the website and see what type of font they will have to read on the article: if they do not like the font, they will simply click off the website as they are either not happy reading too small a font or an unreadable font (like a funky handwritten font).

There is a simple fix, though – make sure your font is easily readable and, more importantly, big as big reading font is much more desirable by web users than small font.

Poor Load Times

I admit I have been one of them people that have pressed the back button on my web browser because I became too impatient of a website’s loading time. Ideally, you will want a website to load in under 3 seconds: anything above 3 seconds and the web user will become impatient. Therefore, if you find your website’s loading time is slow, have a look at what is loading on your website and try to clean up the junk in your HTML coding to minimise the amount needing loading per page.