Are Your Visitors Leaving Quickly

A “bounce” is defined as a visitor leaving your website without checking out another page. Your bounce rate reveals how visitors engage with your website. Does your visitor interact with your website further than the homepage or do they exit the same page that they started with?

Obviously you want people to explore what you have to offer. High bounce rates are subject to misunderstanding. Most people think that a high bounce rate is related to low page performance but it has more to do with what you are communicating.

It’s important to understand factors that are keeping people from going further.

Here are some of the factors that can help you improve:

Slow Loading

Most people know page loading time is pivotal for web traffic. Visitors are high-velocity and have no time to spare. Moreover, Google puts site speed at the top of the list when it comes to ranking.

Failing to meet visitors’ need for speed means giving in to the competition. Studies reveal that just a one-second delay can cost you up to 7 percent on conversion rates.

Assess large media files and reconsider scripts. Run a Page Speed Insights test and follow Google’s recommendations to make sure pages run smoothly.

Misleading Descriptions

Often a bounce occurs when the wrong audience lands on a page. It starts with how a page is advertised.

Misleading title tags and meta descriptions translate to poor targeting–the main reason for pogo-sticking and short clicks. Users will go back to SERP to find a page that best satisfies their queries.

The snippet is your first chance to win an audience. Think of it as an ad. It should reflect quality copywriting that accurately summarizes the landing page.

Low-Quality Content

If you make your snippet catchy to attract clicks, then ensure page content meets expectations. Falling short of expectations makes users feel misled. Bouncing is inevitable.

Instead, do your best to create compelling content (true, easier said than done).

Here are basics:

• Optimize headings for main keywords
• Keep phrases short
• Improve internal linking
• Use enticing call-to-actions
• Mention related blog entries to keep users interested
• Error 404
• Error and blank pages are a UX nightmare. Most of the time, visitors will bounce off, never to return.

Nobody likes landing on an error page, so offer a surprise. Add a fun message and guide visitors to relevant content.

GTMetrix and your Google Search Console will check how pages are loading. Fix broken links, errors, and troubleshoot your pages to prevent bouncing.

Bad Link from Another Site

Perhaps visitors are bouncing because another source has misguided them to your site.

Website crawling will help you detect outdated or unsuitable inbound links. If this is the case, fix it by asking the author to update or delete the reference.

Disavow the errant link to make sure your website’s value is not hurt.

Mobile Friendly

What? You’re still not mobile-friendly? Mobile consumption and distribution peaked this year. More than 80 percent of time online was accessed via mobile.

If your analytics show pages performing on desktop, but not on mobile, then there is little surprise why people are bouncing.

Some common mistakes of non-mobile-friendly websites:

• Content is wider than the screen
• Links are too close together
• Text is too small to read

Google’s mobile-friendly test can assess your site. And make sure you’re ready for Google’s mobile-first indexing before March 2021.

Bad Form

Chances are you’ve started to fill in a web form and shortly abandoned the process. We all have.

So, keep forms short, relevant, and easy to fill in. Ensure visitors you will protect their information. Enough said.

No Call To Action (CTA)

If there is no CTA, then the visitor will leave once she has finished reading.

If your business promotes a product or service that is related to the content, then clearly link to your product or service page. If you do not have a product or service that you want to promote, then try linking to related articles that will keep the visitor on the site.

Every visitor that clicks to another of your pages is one fewer bounce.

Check your site speed. It makes a huge difference in user experience.

There is clear documentation that load times will improve your website’s potential for new customers. Load times are that important. Luckily there are many resources for testing your site speed. You don’t have to be a developer to use the tools and they provide good details on their test results. Speed tests may vary based on the geographic location of the test, time of day, and other factors.

Check Out: How Page Load Speed Affects Customer Behavior

Page Load Time Factors

When a request for a web page is made, the front-end and server-side components both take a certain amount of time to complete their operations. Since their operations are essentially sequential, their cumulative time can be considered the Total Page Load Time.

Recommended tools for testing a site:

• Pingdom Website Speedtest Tools
• GTMetrix
• WebPageTest
• Google Lighthouse for Chrome, or, Google PageSpeed Insights
• Chrome / Firefox’s ‘network’ information

Each of these tools has a slightly different approach when it comes to measurement, reporting, and making suggestions for improvements. To get the most out of them, you’ll need a good understanding of the different metrics they measure, and to understand how best to interpret the results.

Yoast.com has an excellent resource on how to check your site speed.

WordPress plugins can help to speed up your site

There are three performance categories which WordPress plugins can help:

• Implement caching (server-side and/or client-side)
• Alter the way in which your theme (and/or database) works/loads
• Image optimization

There are some speed optimisation plugins which are very specialised, and focus on doing a very good job on just one small part of these categories. Other plugins may tackle most, or even all of these areas, but do so more generally. It’s rare to find a single plugin which solves all of these problems.

Installing one (and only one!) of the following plugins should get you started. Most of them come with full page caching (where a static version of each page is saved and served to users, without needing to load WordPress and your whole site), and various image compression settings.

• WP Rocket – very powerful, and one of the very best options to make your site faster. Designed to be simple. No free option.
• W3 Total Cache – extremely powerful, and extremely flexible. Designed to be comprehensive. Hundreds of checkboxes and options.
• WP Optimize – A good middle ground, with basic full page caching, and some sophisticated database + media optimization tools.
• WP Super Cache – A basic solution which offers full page caching, but lacks other/advanced optimization techniques.
• Autoptimize – Some really clever JavaScript/CSS/HTML optimization, though no full page caching (should work well with a dedicated full page caching solution)

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Improve your website performance with online tools for testing.

Optimizing for quality of user experience is key to the long-term success of your website. Online performance tools can help you quantify the experience of your site and identify opportunities to improve.

Google has conducted research to determine an accurate way to measure when a web page has finished loading. It uses a metric called Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). LCP measures when the largest element was rendered.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

As currently specified in the Largest Contentful Paint API, the types of elements considered for Largest Contentful Paint are:

• <img> elements
• <image> elements inside an <svg> element
• <video> elements (the poster image is used)
• An element with a background image loaded via the url() function (as opposed to a CSS gradient)
• Block-level elements containing text nodes or other inline-level text elements children.

Take special note of <img> elements. “img” refers to images on your page. Image size is one of the biggest items that will slow down a page load. There are many third-party tools that allow you to see how your page is performing.

Online performance tools that provide data for website performance:

1. GTMetrix (free and paid)
2. Site 24×7 (free and paid)
3. WebPage Test (free)
4. Varvy Pagespeed Optimization (free)
5. Google PageSpeed Insight (free)
6. Pingdom (free and paid)
7. Uptime (paid)

With the help of these tools, you can monitor the speed and performance of your website.

1. GTMetrix

GTmetrix is an online application for testing web page speed. This is my favorite tool for testing web page speed. It is totally free and very intuitive to understand. It offers free insight into page performance without a fee or even registration. Just visit the website, copy the URL of the page you wish to analyze and see the results. If you need more detailed monitoring, create a free account, or sign up for the paid version.

The results include performance scores, represented by grades from A to F for page speed and YSlow (a tool that tells you why your page is slow). Also, GTmetrix provides page details like page load time, its totals size, and the number of requests.

2. Site 24×7

Site 24×7 is an alternative to Pingdom that offers a free version, along with small or premium plans.

This budget-friendly tool provides website, network, server, and application monitoring. User feedback for real user monitoring is also included.  You can use it on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X. The paid plan covers five complete server monitors and 50 alerts per month. The free version is limited to 5 server uptime monitors and ten alerts per month.

3. WebPage Test

WebPageTest is a free testing tool that runs speed tests from multiple locations around the world.

It takes into account the type of browser, device, connection speed, and cache state the user has to obtain concrete results. It offers advanced and straightforward testing, a visual comparison, and traceroute examination.

Advanced testing allows you to decide on the number of tests you want to run, get first and repeat view of the web page and capture of a video of the visual progress of loading.

4. Varvy Pagespeed Optimization

Varvy Pagespeed Optimization is a free, online tool used for optimizing speed.

After entering the web page URL, it gives you a summary and a 5-part report. The report examines your resources, CSS delivery, JavaScript usage, services, and page speed issues. Varvy has a useful selection of resource articles and tutorials to help you improve performance. The tool also has an entire section dedicated to SEO and mobile optimization guides.

5. Google PageSpeed Insight

Google PageSpeed Insight is an excellent free page speed testing tool.

Once you insert the URL of the page you want to check, it gives you an overall score for page speed. Based on that score, it tells you whether the web page is fast, average, or slow. There are two different scores you can earn – one based on the website’s mobile performance and the other on its desktop performance. Most importantly, the tool provides advice on how to optimize response time.

6. Pingdom

Pingdom is one of the best performance monitoring services for business.

It provides web performance monitoring and uptime alerts by the minute. The tool gives an in-depth insight into page speed and performance expectations with SMS or email notifications. However, it does not have a free version. If you are unsure whether to commit to a subscription, try using its free 14-day trial.

Credit: https://phoenixnap.com/kb/best-website-speed-performance-test-tools

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