10 common reasons behind the high bounce rate (+useful solutions to reduce it)

Are visitors leaving your website? Does the high bounce rate worry you? Undoubtedly, a high bounce rate in the reports is not the best thing you can see as a website owner, but no matter how bad the situation is, there’s no need to panic. 

Luckily, with only a few adjustments, you will be able to improve those scary numbers.

To do this you have to fully understand the reason or reasons behind the issue. Once you can detect the reasons that make your visitors leave your pages, you can make the necessary actions to turn them back. Simple as that. 

To help you, we created a list of 10 common reasons that can lead to a high bounce rate. We are also going to give you solutions to each, so you can start enhancing your website right away!

Ready? Let’s get started.

#1 Slow loading

Google has a special focus on the speed of websites, so a slow loading page can be a huge problem when it comes to your bounce rate.

Site speed is crucial. Just think about it: users want to access the right information fast, and Google wants to promote relevant content as quickly as possible to provide its users with a positive experience. 

If it takes much time for your pages to load, users will simply bounce back and choose another source for their search. 

Solution:

• Hire an SEO or marketing professional that knows how to fix site speed
• To review your page speed, rely on powerful tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console PageSpeed, GTmetrix, etc.

#2 Too efficient content

This might sound surprising, but too efficient content can also lead to your visitors leaving your website quickly. Why? The answer is very simple: if people get what they want easily in a short amount of time, they will leave your website. 

No matter you have the best content, flawless SEO, you can still find yourself dealing with a high bounce rate.  

Solution:

• Look at reports and metrics in Google Analytics to define whether you should worry about the high bounce or not. For example, if you have a landing page that only requires completing a short form, you don’t need to take it into consideration as an issue.
• Conduct A/B testing for user experience

#3 Disproportionate contribution by certain pages

As you could see in the previous section, the reasons behind your high bounce rate might be caused by some pages that are contributing disproportionally to the overall bounce rate for your site.

If your short CTA page is the cause of visitors bouncing back after taking action, but other pages with more content have a lower bounce rate, you have nothing to worry about.

The best is to confirm this is the case, though.

Solutions:

• Sort your pages in Google Analytics by Bounce Rate to see which pages have a high bounce rate
• Add a filter to remove certain pages from the metrics

#4 Misleading title or meta description

Another reason may be the incorrect title tag or meta description you added to your pages. Make sure these accurately summarize the content you have on your website. If not, visitors will leave your site quickly, simply because you don’t have the information they are looking for.

Solutions:

• Review your content and make sure it has a correct and relevant title tag and meta data.
• If needed, rewrite or improve the content on your website so it can provide useful information in search queries.
• In case Google generated your meta description, make sure you always check it and confirm that it is correct. 

#5 Technical error

Blank pages, 404 errors, fail of loading… These are the most annoying things a user can see when searching for urgent information.

If your bounce rate is extremely high, you might be dealing with these issues. Needless to say, you should act as quickly as possible and remedy the situation so your visitors can access your website without a problem. 

Solutions:

• Try to access your website in the most popular browsers and configurations to get a clear picture of the actual user experience.
• Use Search Console under Coverage to learn more about the issue from the perspective of Google

#6 Bad link from other sources 

Unfortunately, even if you do everything perfectly, you might still be experiencing a high bounce rate. If you have no idea what is the reason behind the issue, it might worth checking all the links leading to your website.

Due to poor copywriting or simply inserting the link in the wrong part of the copy, referring sites sometimes send unqualified visitors to websites. This results in visitors leaving your site as soon as they landed on it and causing a high bounce rate.

Solutions:

• Contact the author or editor of the article and ask them politely to remedy the situation or remove the link.
• Update your disavow file in Search Console

#7 Poor content

A common reason why visitors bounce back from websites is poorly written content. Keep in mind, if your content is bad, the message is incoherent or the copy is full of grammatical mistakes, users won’t appreciate it. Instead, they will leave your page and most likely, never come back.

Solutions:

• Ask for a second, third, even fourth opinion. Show the content on your website to your friends or someone experienced in copywriting and kindly ask them to review it.
• Optimize your content for online reading: use paragraphs, short sentences, insert pictures, make it easy to read and easy to understand. 

#8 Aggressive marketing

Bombarding your visitors with CTAs, ads, pop-ups, e-mail subscribe notifications, surveys and all kinds of heavy marketing won’t lead to success. On the contrary, it will make the user experience for your visitors horrible and they will run from you.

Solutions:

• Choose your battles: use only relevant CTAs and make sure you don’t suffocate your visitors with pop-ups and ads.

#9 Your website is not mobile-friendly 

More and more people use their phones as the first device to get online and connect to the internet. It gives quick access to information, no matter the location or timing. 

If your website is not mobile-friendly yet, you’ve got a huge problem that needs to be solved as quickly as possible.

Websites that are not optimized for mobile devices have a long list of issues: they load extremely slowly and they look terrible.

Solutions:

• Simple as that: upgrade your website and make sure it has a mobile-friendly version that can be easily accessed by all types of devices. 

#10 Asking for too much

Last, but not least, if you ask for too much, you most likely will scare away your visitors. Asking them for personal information, credit card number, social security number, or anything so personal in a huge pop-up, will make them think you are a fraud and they will quickly bounce back from your website. 

Solutions:

• Build trust with your customers before you ask for their personal information
• If you sell anything, don’t overemphasize the payment process, make it an obvious next step for the customer

Final Thoughts

As you can see, in case your website has a higher bounce rate than usual, there are many ways to improve the situation. No need to panic, all you need to do is detect what is causing the issue, then solve the problem relying on special tools or simply listening to your common sense and putting the experience of your visitors first.

We hope that our article could help you learn more about the possible reasons behind the high bounce rate. If you liked the article, don’t hesitate to share it with others as well!