How to Keep Visitors on Your Website Longer

After you have tirelessly driven traffic to your website, the worst thing that could happen is for them to click off your page after a few seconds. Don’t lose those leads by only focusing on website traffic. To convert these leads into potential customers, you should prioritise on ways to keep them on your website longer. To measure the effectiveness of your site’s landing page in terms of getting the visitors to stay, check the website bounce rates. Bounce rates, also known as exit rates, is an effective indication of the user behaviour on your website to measure how effective your landing pages are in generating the interest of the visitors and potentially converting them. A website that has a high bounce rate means that it doesn’t engage the visitors enough and this will lead to an overall poor performance for the sales team.

To lower the bounce rates of your website and keep visitors engaged, you need to make sure that your website has been fully optimised from having an easy user navigation to having a great, engaging content. Here are five proven ways you can make visitors stay on your website and boost the performance of your site.

Make Sure Your Webpage Loads Quickly

When Google ranks websites in their search engine, page load time is a huge factor. According to a study done by KISSmetrics, 47% of visitors will leave the webpage if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. A 1-second delay can even reduce the conversion rate of the site by 7%. There are a number of ways you can reduce the page loading time:

• Make sure that your site is not hosting a huge number of videos or advertisements. If you have to host these videos or ads, position them in areas on your website that won’t affect the initial page loading time and won’t distract your visitors from the main content that they are looking for in the first place.
• Optimise your images through image compression. You can manually compress the individual images on your computer or opt for image compression plugins on WordPress that will automatically compress your images.
• Optimise the server performance of your site with a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN has multiple servers that are distributed throughout various countries the world and will deliver the content of your site to the visitor through the server located closest to them.

To find out what exactly is slowing down your site, run a Google PageSpeed Insights report or other similar tools. The report will help to pinpoint the main factors that contributed to your slow page speed and the recommended ways you can resolve these issues. You should never ignore the issue of page speed as your page visitor will not patiently wait for your site to load no matter how great your products or services are. They would instead look for alternative options that have a faster web page and go to your competitors instead. Having a fast web page is a must for any business.

Develop a User-Friendly Website

To ensure your visitors have the best experience on your website, you need to make sure that your page can be easily navigated. Visitors need to be able to easily move around your site and find what they are looking for. A website with a complicated structure can lead to visitors exiting the page quickly. To develop a user-friendly website, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Establish a clear and concise sitemap
  Choose a trendy and suitable design for the website
• Make sure your website design is consistent with your company’s logo, such as the colour schemes
• Position a suitable Call to Action (CTA) section on the page to boost conversion rates

Remember, a user-friendly website should be easy to navigate, intuitive to the users and should follow a logical line of thought.

Create Content that is Engaging

If your site does not have new and engaging content, your visitors might get the wrong impression that the company has become inactive. Invest the time and resources needed to create content that speaks to the readers and fulfil their needs quickly. Content that is evergreen is the best kind of content as it will be relevant throughout time. Create fresh content and constantly update it so that both new and returning visitors are engaged with your site. Always update your site with the latest content or events that are relevant to your brand to increase the interest of your visitors. Constant activity on your site will also help your site to rank higher on search engines.

Create Content that is Readable and Scannable

When a visitor lands on your website, most of them would scan the webpage to either determine if it is worth reading or find one or two paragraphs that directly address their need. People generally look out for important words or phrases in the webpage instead of reading every word. Content that is chunky and made of long sentences tend to turn visitors off quickly. To ensure your site can be easily read and scanned by the visitors, you can carry out these actionable steps:

• Increase the font size and line spacing on your site to make sure your content is large enough to be read easily.
• Break up your content by shortening your sentences, adding images between paragraphs, and making sure your paragraphs are only up to three or four sentences.
• Create sections with engaging subheadings.
  • To make sure your information can be easily scanned, divide it up into sections with proper headers. Headings and subheadings have always been an important on-page factor when it comes to ranking the page as it helps the search engine crawlers understand the content better.
• Use numbered or bulleted lists.
  • Lists help the reader to scan your content for the important points.
  • Numbered lists help the readers understand that the content is being presented from the first to last step or from best to worst rank.
• For statistical information, present it using graphs or charts.
  • Graphs or charts help to highlight the most important statistics in your content and are great visual aids in comparing data chronologically or thematically. Make sure to credit your site if you are the source of the statistics as this is a great way to encourage backlinks.
• Use tables to help readers understand complicated concepts with just a glance.

Make Sure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly

More and more users browse websites through their mobile devices. In fact, traffic from mobile devices is beginning to overtake those from desktop computers. Google has even introduced a ‘mobile-friendly’ tag in its search engine results and made it part of its ranking algorithm. Having a mobile-friendly website is critical for all businesses now more than ever. To keep people who are browsing from their mobile phones or tablets on your site, you have to make sure that your website looks great and optimised on their devices.

The best way to make sure your site is optimised for mobile traffic is to have a responsive web design. A responsive website will adjust the page layout and its styling according to the screen size of the visitors. This will make sure that your site looks great when viewed from any devices.