5 Simple Design Tweaks to Reduce Your Site’s Bounce Rate

If there’s one word you don’t want to see in your site’s analytics data it’s “bounce”. Officially, a bounce is a visitor that leaves your site quickly after stopping by. Unofficially, a bounce represents wasted marketing dollars and missed opportunities. Fortunately, even if you have a high bounce rate there are a few simple tweaks you can do to your design to help bring that number down.

Make Above the Fold Clickable

No matter what niche you happen to be in, your visitors probably don’t have a lot in common: except for the fact that they all see the above the fold area of your site.

It’s crucial that you have a strong call to action in that area that entices and engages your site’s visitors. That means an opt-in form, your top articles or a link to a valuable resource page. This is something that Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income does very well. At the top of his homepage he features a link to a page full of his best content.

Remove Clutter

Many sites have far too much going on with their design. With banners, badges and other flashy items your site’s core message could get lost. And a confused visitor is one that’s likely to leave very, very quickly.

As you can see here, the posts at Survey Spencer are very simple and clean, giving the reader a chance to check out the content and click around…not click away.

Provide Value Right Away

Sometimes you can forget that your visitors are impatient and navigate your site differently than you probably do. When designing content-rich pages make sure to give them the good stuff (the answer to their question or solution to their problem) right away. That means pushing page buttons to the sides or bottom of your pages in some instances.

Add Media

Videos, images and infographics are just three examples of different media you can use to engage your site’s visitors and keep them on your site. Words are great and will remain dominant on the web for many years to come, but there’s no question that many visitors prefer to see fresh content presented in different mediums.

Don’t Be Afraid to Contrast

One common mistake web designers make when creating a site is keeping the color scheme pretty much the same throughout the entire page. It’s incredibly important to have contrasting colors on your landing pages in order to draw visitors attention to your compelling content. This also helps visually impaired folks interact with your site.

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