Why Web Designers Should Care More About Bounce Rate

Why Web Designers Should Care More About Bounce Rate

It doesn’t really matter whether you run an informative blog, a brochure website to advertise your local business to the world, or an eCommerce platform. If you have a website, your ultimate aim is to create the ideal circumstances that allow your visitors to explore your content in-depth. 

You want your audience to learn more about your company, ask questions, book an appointment, or buy something. What happens when you get plenty of traffic — people visiting your website from search engines or links — but they don’t stick around?

When a disproportionate number of visitors leave your website after a quick glance at just one page, they either didn’t find what they were looking for or had a reason to leave. 

The reasons behind a high bounce rate can fall into two separate categories. You could be attracting the wrong kind of traffic, or there could be something wrong with your website. Web designers can play a crucial role in ensuring that the reasons for a high bounce rate have nothing to do with the website’s aesthetic and functionality.

What Is a Website’s Bounce Rate, and Why Does it Matter?

A bounce can simply be defined as a single-page session — or, in other words, what happens when someone visits a website and returns to the search engine results page or the website they came from without interacting with the content any further.

Visitors who bounce don’t look at the site’s About page, don’t fill out any forms, don’t buy anything, and don’t explore the content any further. In many cases, they’ll never come back to the website. 

A site’s bounce rate is, as you’d imagine, a metric that shows you how often that happens. 

Most people outside of the web design industry instantly form the impression that a high bounce rate means something wrong, while a low bounce rate indicates that a website is performing well. It is a little more complex than that in practice, but here’s a very rough guide:

  • A very low bounce rate of 25 per cent or less often indicates that a website’s analytics are set up incorrectly. 
  • A well-performing website could have a bounce rate of anywhere between 26 and 70 per cent. Visitors who have found what they are looking for stay to interact with the website more, exploring multiple pages and perhaps making a purchase, jotting down a company’s contact information from their Contact page, or reading additional content.
  • A bounce rate of 71 percent or higher could be acceptable, depending on the nature of the website, but companies will want to dive more deeply into the reason behind the higher bounce rate in this case. Generally, the higher the bounce rate, the more likely it becomes that the company’s web strategy could benefit from serious improvements.

How Can Web Designers Impact a Website’s Bounce Rate?

Many factors can influence the bounce rate any given website has at any given point in time. Some of them have nothing to do with the website’s design. For instance, the content might be poor or outdated — or a lot of traffic could be coming from low-quality sources such as poorly placed ad campaigns or even bad links. 

On a more positive note, visitors might also have found what they were looking for on that single page, and in the case of affiliate websites, they might have moved on to interact with the exact content you wanted them to.

However, many of the problems that directly lead to a high bounce rate can ultimately be tied back to web design. Some of them are:

  • A dated or unappealing aesthetic, which can apply to web design in Birmingham as well as the graphics on the website. Visitors make quick judgments, and a website needs to inspire trust instantly to encourage users to explore further. Web design plays a critical role here. Today’s users demand clean and uncluttered websites.
  • Slow loading. Few things make visitors run in the other direction — back to Google — faster than a website that doesn’t load instantly. 
  • A website that is not optimised for mobile users. Since the number of mobile users is ever-growing, this one speaks for itself. 
  • A frustrating user experience with complicated navigation leaves visitors feeling like they can’t find what they are looking for. 
  • Under-optimised titles and meta descriptions that miss the mark can lead to a situation where a website receives lots of traffic, but from the wrong kinds of visitors. The same holds true for other aspects of on-site Search Engine Optimisation. Because web design companies may offer specialised Liverpool SEO services, too, these issues can be influenced at the design level as well.

Why Should Web Designers Care More About the Bounce Rate?

A website’s bounce rate is one of the most critical parameters any business should examine to determine how well its website is performing. The reason why business owners should care more about their bounce rate than they probably do is no secret, then. 

Why should web designers and web design companies, who design and develop websites for clients, pay just as much attention to the bounce rate, though? 

Ultimately, our Birmingham website design company aims to create a creative and functional design that perfectly meets the client’s needs — and that means a website that the target audience experiences as a pleasure to explore.

A dated, cluttered, design that is not mobile-friendly will quickly send visitors running for the hills. A site that’s complicated to navigate and can’t find what they are looking for even though it is present will make them give up. 

If a website has a high bounce rate, these factors are far from the only potential causes, but they are among a list of possible culprits. A web designer’s job is not done unless they can eliminate themselves as the cause of a high bounce rate, and more web designers should be paying close attention to this metric.