Your website’s bounce rate is one of the biggest determining factors in how well your website is doing its job. It’s true you don’t always have control over which users leave your website. Sometimes your site wasn’t what the user was looking for. But some high bounce rates are self-inflicted including performance errors and marketing mistakes. 

To help you fight back against a high bounce rate, here are some of the most common reasons why online users leave websites and how you can avoid making those same mistakes.

Annoying pop-ups

Many organizations include pop-up ads on their website to get new users to sign up for email subscriptions. While this pop-up might not seem like a big deal at the time, it’s important to keep in mind that every other business is doing the same thing.

The result? Online users are being bombarded with email blasts and other annoying pop-ups that are keeping them from seeing the information they need. 

Hiding the ‘x’ button on ads

Fortunately, pop-ups aren’t always a deal breaker. Users who still want to access your website’s information will click ‘x’ on the pop-up and continue their navigation. But if you’re purposefully hiding the ‘x’ on your pop-up ad to make it harder for users to ignore it, you could be frustrating your audience right off your website.

That said, avoid including pop-ups on your website that take up the entire screen. If you do include them, consider increasing the amount of time between when the user is on the site and when the ad pops up. Nothing feels more out-of-touch with the user experience than a ‘Before You Leave!’ pop-up when the user has just clicked onto your page.

Slow load times

Websites with load times between one and three seconds increase their bounce rate probability by 23%. Those with load times between one and 10 seconds increase their bounce rate probability by 123%. 

It’s easy to make light of statistics like these and chuff up bounce rate percentages to impatient users. But if you use a timer to wait out those seconds yourself, a 10-second load time is an incredibly long time to wait for a website to load. 

Slow load times give users a hint to what their user experience is going to be. If your landing page takes 10 seconds to load, then every other page on your website might be the same. For users who want information fast, that’s too much wasted time.

The good news is that are are many different ways you can reduce your website’s load time including:

  • Deferring JavaScript loading
  • Using asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files
  • Minimizing HTTP requests
  • Reducing server response time
  • Running a compression audit
  • Choosing the right hosting option

It can be challenging to figure out what’s causing your website’s high bounce rate. But when you take the time to analyze your site and correct the mistakes above, you can put yourself on the right track to shrinking your bounce rate to a normal percentage.