5 ways your landing page is driving up your bounce rate

User experience for any website is heavily influenced by the loading time of a page. Page loading speed is a key component of SEO, it contributes significantly to your page rankings, and excessive load times can cause users to leave the page. Consequently, page loading speed has an important influence on the success of a website.

Free site speed test tools are available online to find precise load times of your pages, and discover whether it may be contributing to your bounce rate. One reason for increased page loading times is large multimedia images and videos on your site. To rectify this and decrease page loading speeds, ensure that all media on your website is correctly optimised. If you are using WordPress, there are a variety of plugins available which can automatically correct your image file sizes.

Almost 60% of internet users are browsing from a mobile device. How does your landing page work on mobile? How does your site look and navigate on different size screens? Neglecting to focus on a significant proportion of your website users is a huge oversight, and could be contributing to a high bounce rate.

Use Google’s free tool to test the mobile usability of your site. This tool also provides a full site-wide report when your website is connected to Google Search Console. Within this report in GSC, individual mobile usability issues are indicated and the specific pages affected highlighted.

Amending these issues will improve the mobile user experience of your site, and can, in turn, reduce bounce rates from mobile users

Your landing page is the hub that your users start at and should consequently display clear next steps in site navigation and purchases. If you don’t appropriately direct your users to relevant pages within your site, they will bounce out of the page.

Include a clear call to action on your landing page so users will have direction to progress through your sales funnel, ultimately resulting in conversions for your business.

Users do not want to have to work hard to decipher your page. Difficult to comprehend and hard to read pages result in high bounce rates. Be cautious of the effect the formatting of text has on the legibility and readability of your page.

For example, some fonts might look appropriate in heading text but are difficult to read when used in body copy of a page. Similarly, font size also plays a part in the readability of a page as fonts which are too small can be difficult to read. Additionally, breaking up paragraphs also improve the readability of a page as continuous walls of text are off-putting to users and contribute to the challenge of reading a page.

Additionally, poor spelling and grammatical errors can also have a negative impact on users interpretation of a site and subsequent business. Always make sure that your web text is free from errors, and that the language used is easy for your readers to comprehend.

By understanding the impact and effect a landing page has on-site visitors and bounce rate, you can start to take steps and changes to improve your landing page experience, improving conversion rates and user experience.