How many visitors come to your homepage only to leave just a few seconds later?
Five, fifty percent… ninety percent?
The percentage of visitors who leave your site from any given page is known as the bounce rate. Keeping track of bounce rate for your homepage is particularly important, especially if most people visit your site for the first time through that page.
You want those visitors to arrive at your homepage and find information that interests them on pages linked from the homepage. Ideally, they'll stay on your site until they've signed up for your newsletter and then leave the site purchase one of the products that you've recommended.
Here are some tips to help you lower the bounce rate on your homepage.
- Speed up your page load times. Slow loads are the main reason people don't stick around a site. If a homepage takes more than a few seconds to load completely, the site is losing potential revenue. Plugins are a common cause of slow page loads. Deactivate those plugins which aren't absolutely necessary. If it still loads slowly investigate ways to hardcode the plugin's functionality.
- Turn off related YouTube videos. After someone watches a YouTube video on your homepage, YouTube presents other relevant video options which all link off your site. Remember — keep links that don't generate revenue to an absolute minimum and NEVER place them on your homepage. If you want your visitors to see a video that you have posted on YouTube, uncheck the box that says “Include related videos”.
- Reduce the number of links on your homepage. Options are good. Too many options can be overwhelming. If you are using a blog theme like StudioPress that allows you to place recent posts under specific categories on your homepage, keep both the number of posts and categories to a minimum. Too, get rid of the ‘monthly archives' links in your sidebar as those lists of links get very long, very quickly.
- Get rid of the popups and page peels. When content on a site is compelling, a blogger doesn't need to annoy his or her visitors with endless in-your-face pop-ups to join their newsletter or ‘page peels' that display advertising in an irritating way.
- Limit or avoid advertising on your homepage. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, especially when you see all those popular blogs with 6 to 10 different banners in the header, sidebar and footers. The key phrase there is ‘popular'. A popular blog can afford a higher bounce rate through advertising. A new blog without much traffic needs to build rank and readership, and placing links out on the homepage is not the way to accomplish that goal. You want to warm your readers up to a product or service before sending them to the merchant's site.
- Place content strategically. Keep your most important content near the top of your homepage. For example, at the top-center of the homepage on my dating service review blog, I have a list of the Top 10 Things to Do on 101Date.com. Have such a list gives readers a quick scan of all the important areas of the site in a very small, obvious area. I found that adding that list lowered the homepage bounce rate on that site by about 20%.
Do you have any other ideas for lowering the bounce rate on your pages? Please share them with us by leaving a comment below.
Unfortunately none of these points helped reducing high (97%) bounce rate on my food blog. And the average visit’s time is 4 seconds only! I guess there must be something else wrong with it :(.
Hi Dorota,
Your blog looks beautiful, but my Polish is really limited so I can’t really say whether or not your titles are compelling people to click on them and go deeper into the site. what I would suggest however is that you make your newsletter signup more prominent by placing it closer to the top of the sidebar. And get rid of the Google search… use the WordPress search.
I hope that helps.
Cheers,
Ros
Thanks for the tips, Rosalind. These really helps.
I think point #6 about content placement is so important! Last week, I was in the process of making a few modifications to one of my sites. During that process, I had graphics and other content moving around. At one of my stopping points, my site wasn’t as eye-catching as is usually is. The next day when I checked my stats, the bounce rate was through the roof. This experience showed me how important it is to have a well-organized and attractive page.
In order to keep your bounce rate down make sure you’re advertising is targeted as much as possible. I’ve found that doing random ads that arent closely related to what people are searching for causes them to bounce off the sites fast. Great tips. Thank You.
Hi Ros, these are all great suggestions and mistakes a lot of us make, especially on your home page. Since your home page is a lead in to other pages if I can get people to those pages I guess I’m doing fairly good 🙂
@Sammy – A bounce in Google’s eyes occurs when you click the back button returning to Google’s search result page, click a link and then hit the back button on a linking site, or when you open a link in a tab and close the tab.
Continuing down the click stream is a good indicator, clicking the back button is not.
However “time on site” is important too. The way I see it is you need to get positive indicators in both. That’s why I mentioned video in my comment above and how to use YouTube properly. Best way to meet both goals with one tactic and generate lots of new traffic too.
I totally agree with Jose. Nowadays there are many popular blogs that are very commercial. And I think everybody hates pop ups. The main point here is keeping it simple.
A popular blog can afford a higher bounce rate through advertising. A new blog without much traffic needs to build rank and readership, and placing links out on the homepage is not the way to accomplish that goal.
Great tips.. you also want to have relevant content that fits the visitors that come to your blog 🙂
Good post, Rosalind. Thanks for the advises.
Great tips,
Now I undertand how to reduce my bounce rate. Perhaps, i have to remove those unrelated banners or links. Thanks alot
Nice advice!thank you .. got to print this and email to some friends!
I just read your book and been hunting down all your other stuff on the internet. I love it! It’s been the best advice I’ve received on affiliate marketing.
Thank You,
Sandy
Hi Rosalind
thanks for this wonderful info. I was just looking out for something like this.
But i require a clarification here. I was focussing on adding great content on my home page and part of it, I did by including links to popular posts and recent posts. I figured that since these are links which point to articles within my site, the visitor would be directed to more content and hence bounce rate would go down.
But here you say quite the opposite. Can you please clarify why so?
I agree about the monthly archives though. I think hardly anybody goes to see what posts would be there month by month.
I need to take that out of my site. Thanks again
Great tips Rosalind!
I really appreciate what you mentioned about limiting or avoiding advertising on your homepage. For that matter, anywhere on your blog.
I think it really boils down to what your goals are for your blog. Some bloggers are all about the money and put just enough content up to make it a legitimate blog and not just a sales page.
Then there are the bloggers who are more interested in providing value first and building a readership and perhaps monetizing in a different way – perhaps an info product or coaching.
I personally think value trumps all to build a loyal following. If you have your blog splattered with links to other people then it diminishes your own content.
Thank you for great content!
Hi Rosalind, thank you for these tips.
I never actually realized a slow loading blog could be the cause of a high bounce rate so thanks for pointing that out.
I am off to my wordpress admin area to look over my wp plugins and ditch the ones that are not essential.
Thanks again Sally 🙂
Hi Rosalind,
Good post. Thanks for the info.
But I would like to point out that a ‘squeeze page’ (a one page website, with the only purpose of building your list) will always have a high bounce rate, because it is a one page website, no other webpage is there.
Either the visitor sign’s up on the page or doesn’t. There is no 3rd option.
Kindest,
Nabeel
Great post,
thank you,
will try some of them to reduce bounce rate
Thanx
Thanks for sharing the link, but unfortunately it seems to be down… Does anybody have a mirror or another source? Please reply to my post if you do!
Thanks,
Mark
Yes, the bounce rate is very important because Google uses it as an indicator of quality on your blog. Lowering the bounce rate will bet you a bit better Google rankings. Having a high (over 80%) will really hurt your rankings.
One thing that will slow visitors down (from leaving) is video. When I first added video my time on site went up by a minute and as much a 4 minutes on my sales letters.
But not using YouTube as you suggest is a mistake. If you don’t want the suggested videos at the end of a YouTube video on your site, just uncheck the “show like content” checkbox when you get the code to embed the video. That simple. Google did just add this in the last year so many may not be aware that there is no reason to avoid YouTube any more.
YouTube is the second most trafficked search engine on the planet and Bing and Yahoo don’t come close to the number of searches run on YouTube. So do you want to host your public videos on ScreenCast or on the second most trafficked search engine?
We routinely get 10,000 to 20,000 views on YouTube videos in a 4 month span by targeting search so don’t discount YouTube because in the past you could not control YouTube. You can now and it is our number one branding and lead generation tool.
Nice post. I never really thought about the bounce rate of my websites before. Something to keep in mind as now I see it’s pretty important.
Cheers,
Stuart Stirling
Thank you Rosalind for your blog, it really adds up to my knowledge. Keep it up!!
“The key phrase there is ‘popular’. A popular blog can afford a higher bounce rate through advertising. A new blog without much traffic needs to build rank and readership, and placing links out on the homepage is not the way to accomplish that goal.”
Now I understand why many popular blogs can afford to appear “very commercial” with lots of ads.
I also checked your dating service review site. It’s awesome.
Thanks Rosalind for this useful post.
Jose
Good post Rosalind, but there is one point that I’d like to clarify – when you embed a YouTube video in a web page, you have the option of turning off related videos. In the embed options in YouTube, uncheck the box that says “Include related videos”, and you’re good to go! 😉
Jimmy
Hi Jimmy,
Awesome advice, thank you! I’ll revise the article appropriately. Proof positive that you CAN learn something new everyday!
Cheers,
Ros
Good idea, Jimmy. Although, once a visitor has finished watching one of our videos, if she left to watch other unrelated videos, that wouldn’t be measured as part of the “bounce rate” in our stats tracking. But it would definitely increase the visitor’s engagement (which could be actually measured as an increment in pages per visit and time spent on our site).