Reduce Your Bounce Rate

So you have been writing great blog posts with tantalizing titles, but your still not gaining the traction you were expecting.  In your analytics, one of the most important statistics to keep an eye on is your bounce rate.  Your bounce rate tells you what percentage of people came to your site, but left without having a look around.  One of the main reasons people leave your site is the time that it takes to load.  Depending on who you ask, the average time that a user will spend on a website before they leave is about 10-30 seconds, but if you sit down and time a 10 second wait, you might find that’s even to long.  If your website is taking too long to load then the only people who will read it are your mom and your girlfriend, but fear not, there are some very simple things you can do to make your blog load faster and decrease your bounce rates.

• The first thing you will want to focus on is keeping the number of articles on your main page to a minimum.  This is not to say that text is bad, but textual overload will turn readers off and distract them.  Most of your readers will come in to your site to see your new content, so feature this.  For a blog, more than five posts is to many for the front page.  If your reader goes through five articles, they won’t mind clicking to the next page to keep reading.

• Images and videos are a great thing to have, but keep in mind they do take more time to load.  Fortunately, there are some simple things you can do to accelerate this process. First, use thumbnails of images or size them down so they load faster. If you have a video you want to show, use a YouTube embedded link instead of flash or QuickTime videos that play automatically.  Videos that just start playing are pretty annoying anyway.  If you have a large amount of images and videos, use an off-site service to arrange them into albums and include a link to it.

• Your site design or blog theme will have the biggest impact on your page load speed, so take some time to choose the right one for you, and don’t be afraid of leaving empty space. If your pages are completely full of images and advertisements, not only will it take a long time to load, but it will also annoy most readers. Next, keep your java script at the bottom of the page and avoid any unnecessary scripts. Finally, ditch anything nonessential from the page. Links to twitter and Facebook are nice, but decide if you really need links to every social media network you are in.

Use these simple tips to get your blog loading in less than 10 seconds so that you can maximize the number of people who will actually read your hard work, and reduce your bounce rate.  Think about the last time you went to a site that took to long to load, you probably didn’t read their content, and have never been back, so don’t let this happen to your site.