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Interested and want Google Analytics to show Bounce Rate low for your website?

Then you need to address all problem creating factors or reasons that is leading to High bounce rate.

Let us explore what are those high bounce rate reasons in the below section.

13 Reasons Why Your Website Has a High Bounce Rate & Solutions To Get Google Analytics Show Bounce Rate Low

The percentage of site visitors that enter through and leave from the same page is called the bounce rate of your website.

Did you know that with the coming of RankBrain, Google use site dwell time as a ranking factor in Search Engine Results (SERPs)

That means as long as your bounce rate is high, you will not do well

Google will always favor web pages or sites with a lower bounce rate

Because a high bounce rate indicates that the content is either not engaging and contains no value.

To check your site Bounce rate, Go to your Google Analytics -> Audience -> Overview

There are many reasons to why your Users leave immediately after landing on your site

So, if your Site bounce rate is high, you might wanna read it till the end:

1) Content Does Not Match The Headline

If you use a super clickbaity title, people are obviously gonna be forced to click on it.

After fixing this issue you may expect Google Analytics to show Bounce Rate too low.

Headlines are like a lifeline to your readers. Their job is to grab attention, build trust and at the same time help time-pressed consumers focus on the stories they care. Headlines link the readers with your content and giving the chance to reach your audience across a sea of data and information.

Let’ say you use the title/headline saying “How to cure cancer in 2 months- Works 100%”

I mean that’s a very promising title and all the people which are curious will swarm over it

Once they are inside the content, what did they get?

It talks about how cancer is disastrous and how to prevent oneself from getting a cancer

Do you really think that they would be happy over that?

No, they will be disappointed and that can badly influence your site

So, when you craft a headline, try to be creative to get the maximum clicks and also at the same time make sure that the title you are using resonates your content too.

Here are some guidelines for choosing your words.

Include Common words and phrases that describe the subject of your content such as “earthquake,” “city council election,” “starting lineup,” “benefit concert.”
Proper names. Search terms tend to contain proper names. Use the Names of technique, place, people, companies which are common search queries. By using commonly used names in your headline will help you match such queries.
Unique information. What is it about your content that people might be looking for that other websites don’t have?

2) Site Load Time Is Slow

This is a very super crucial thing in keeping your bounce rate low. After addressing this issue you may expect Google Analytics to show Bounce Rate low for your website

Nowadays most of the people are impatient including me.

If your website takes a long time to load, chances are they might just exit and go to the next site which talks about it because you aren’t the only one writing an article about that topic.

There could be thousands or even millions of web pages related to that topic.

To check your site load time, I would recommend you to go to Pingdom or GTMetric

For this example, let us use Pingdom. Head over to their site, enter your URL.

You can change the location and click the Start Test

It will show load speed time along with other metrics

They will give you a bunch of suggestion and recommendation you need to solve to increase your website speed

As a matter of fact, Google has finally announced that they are taking in site speed as a ranking factor.

Reasons Why Your Website Speed Is Slow:

Server performance
Server location
Lots of traffic
Extra large images (and complex file format)
Code density
Text graphics
Too many file requests (RTTs)
Too many plugins
Unnecessary redirects
An outdated CMS

Ways to Speed Up Your Website:

Minimize HTTP requests
Minify and combine files
Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files
Defer JavaScript loading
Minimize time to the first byte
Reduce server response time
Choose the right hosting option for your needs
Run a compression audit
Run a compression audit
Enable compression
Enable browser caching
Reduce image sizes
Use a CDN
Use external hosting platforms
Optimize CSS delivery
Prioritize above-the-fold content (lazy loading)
Remove Unnecessary plugins you use on your site
Reduce redirects
Reduce external scripts
Monitor your speed over time
Monitor mobile page speed

Bottom line: Speed is not an option but a mandatory

3) Blank Page/ Error 404 Or Technical Error

If your website has any Blank or error 404 Page, you really need to work on solving that.

Page Not Found errors (also known as 404s) can really increase your site bounce rate as they are leading a visitor to nowhere.

Go to your Google Search Console and under Crawl > Crawl Errors you will find the issue from Google’s perspective.

However, on the other hand, by customizing a good custom 404 page, it can help people find the information they’re looking for and thus reduce the Bounce rate

You can use this Plugin called 404page – your smart custom 404 error page to create a perfect custom Error 404 Page.

After sorting out this issue you may expect Google Analytics to show Bounce Rate low for your website

4) Poor Backlinks

Referral traffic is one among the most targeted and engaging traffic sources

But despite that, if you have a high bounce rate

It might be because of these reasons:

Wrong Anchor Text
Irrelevant Traffic
Click by mistake, etc

5) Poor Content

Let’s be honest here, even if your website loads fast, the headline is relevant to the content but if it’s poor content

Do you really think that they are gonna stick to your Post

So, Make sure that your content is engaging and helpful to your audience enough to keep them interested and encourage further on browsing on your other content

Make your content highly actionable and useful to solve something

6) Bad Readability

Do you wanna read an article with no heading, subheadings whatsoever with just a plain text-based content?

I really don’t think so.

You need to have Proper Headings and Subheadings which will make your reader easy to skim through your content.

After fixing this issue you may expect Google Analytics to show Bounce Rate low for your website

Here are some Tips on a nutshell:

A) Subheaders

B) Short paragraphs.

C) Bullet points

D) Trim sentences

E) Use plain language

F) Use bold and italics sparingly

G) Blockquotes

H) Lot of Whitespaces.

7) Poor navigation

Make sure to have a proper navigation system on your Blog.

Then users will able to navigate to multiple pages on your site and you may expect Google Analytics to show Bounce Rate too low for your website

The primary purpose of website navigation is to help users easily find what they are looking for on your site.

So, Your Primary navigation needs to stand out and be consistent

Typically, the main menu will sit along the top of the page

If possible maintain a Fat footers

8) Your site is not mobile friendly and Have Bad Design

As of May 2018, 52.2% of all worldwide online traffic was generated through mobile phones

That means if your site isn’t mobile friendly, you need to work on that for Google Analytics to show Bounce Rate too low for your website

You will be losing out a bunch of opportunities here if you didn’t do so.

Reasons why your website should be mobile-friendly.

A) Improved user experience

B) Gain an Advantage Over Competitors

C) Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites

D) Your business will be seen as modern and relevant

How to make your website mobile friendly?

A) Use a Mobile-first Responsive Theme Design

B) Compress Your Images and CSS.

C) Include the Viewport Meta Tag (Just paste this onto the html for each page:

D) Use Mobile Plugins (Eg. WPtouch, JetPack, etc)

9) Cross-Browser Responsiveness

Cross-browser Responsive means the web application works with all versions of all browsers.

It’s not possible to have your site design look exactly the same on every browser,

Sometimes, your website load perfectly on Chrome but may break down on Safari Or Opera Mini

This is rare care but just wanna make sure that your website is compatible across all browsers

Go to Using CrossBrowserTesting to check if your site is responsive

CrossBrowserTesting has access to do this in over 1,500 browsers.

10) Pop-Ups And Interstitial

It may be Ads or Your Newsletter form, popping out constantly can lead to poor user experience and can lead to eventually leaving your site.

A study by Hubspot showed that 73% of people find them annoying or intrusive and dislike pop-up ads, and 64% have installed ad blockers.

11) External Links Open In The Same Tab

By allowing the link to open up in a new tab can also help in reducing the bounce rate.

It might not necessarily be the reason that they are clicking on the link because they aren’t interested

They might just wanna check out

But in the eyes of Google, it is recorded as a bounce

To solve this make sure that every external link in the content is always set to open in another tab or window

If you are using WordPress, click the link icon and check the ‘open in new tab’ tickbox.

It’s pretty simple. Ofcourse this in turn going to fix the high bounce rate issue and you may expect Google Analytics to show Bounce Rate too low for your website after implementing the fix.

12) The Answer Was Found

Sometimes, a high bounce rate isn’t always due to the bad reasons

Let’s say someone is searching for a very specific question such as “Who is the President of US”

So, they click on your article and when they see what the wanted such as Donald Trump

They already know the answer, so they might have left.

That doesn’t mean that your site hasn’t helped them. They just got the information they wanted and leave.

13) Security

If your site deals with some sort of handling sensitive information

You really need to not only make your site secure

Do you really expect people to enter their credit card number when your site looks like a scam site

There are many ways to secure your site

Among them Adding an SSL Certificate is one of them

It makes the user trust more and makes your site more legit

Even Google has stated as of July 2018 that it is mandatory to migrate your site from HTTP to HTTPS

So make sure you do that.

Other WordPress Tips to Make Your Website Secure:

Choose a Good Hosting Company- The best way to keep and the foremost thing is to choose a hosting provider who provides multiple layers of security.
Don’t Use Nulled Themes- Choose Premium themes are coded by highly skilled developers and are tested to pass multiple WordPress checks right out of the box.
Install a WordPress Security Plugin- A security plugin takes care your site security, scans for malware and monitors your site 24/7 to regularly check what is happening on your site.
Use a Strong Password- use a complex password, or better yet, one that is auto-generated with a variety of numbers, nonsensical letter combinations and special characters like % or ^.
Disable File Editing
Install SSL Certificate- By using an SSL, the sensitive information is encrypted before it is transferred between their browser and your server, making it more difficult to read and making your site more secure.
Change your WP-login URL
Limit Login Attempts- Limit the number of login attempts, users can try a limited number of times until they are temporarily blocked.
Hide wp-config.php and .htaccess files- To hide the files, after your backup, there are two things you need to do:

First of all, go to your wp-config.php file and add the following code:

order allow,deny

deny from all

</Files>

Same as the above method, add the following code this time to your .htaccess file,

order allow,deny

deny from all

</Files>

Update your WordPress version- Keep your WordPress up to date to keep your website secure.

You need to maintain your WordPress security in order to avoid hackers can easily attacking your site.

Final Words

In all seriousness though, you really need to study your site’s analytics and understand it.

After sorting out all the above specified issues then you may expect Google Analytics to show Bounce Rate low for your website finally down the lane.

You can use tools like Crazy egg to know exactly where your visitors are coming from, where they are scrolling and where they left off

Carefully inspect your site regarding User Experience, Quality of your content, Mobile responsiveness, etc

Hopefully, this article has helped you diagnose what’s causing your high bounce rate,

Am I missing anything?

Do you have anything to add?.

Leave your valuable comments or thoughts on this.