In web design, first impression is an important factor, because it could determine a lasting impression. Good first impression could make a different between a real sale and a failed sales attempt. One factor that’s directly related to first impression is bounce rate. It is used to determine the percentage of visitors who don’t click anything and wait anything to load before leaving the website. If people are immediately disinterested with our website, they will refuse to stay longer or investigate other parts of our website further. There are different reasons of high bounce rate.
As an example, we may not strategically write our content and we don’t refine our keywords. If visitors don’t immediately get an indication of what they need, the bounce rate could soar quite high. As an example, a website 60 percent bounce rate means that 60 percent people who arrive could simply glance around and leave. In real, physical stores, this could be equal to walking by the storefront, stopping to glance for awhile through the windows and then continue on our way. There’s no sale to be made and if stores have a very proportion of people like this, it could become a bad indication.
Web developers should look for ways to encourage people to stick around, so they have the opportunity to check the products and services. Hopefully, this will lead to the actual buying process. It will take less than 10 seconds for people to decide whether they should stay or leave. The most effective way to reduce bounce rate is by indicating to users that we may have something they need or seek. This should keep more visitors and their attention can be retained. We should also remove auto-play videos and animations from our main page. If people are told to wait for 3 minutes for an introduction video to be displayed, they will leave immediately.
We also need to reduce load time and small parts of the website should be displayed immediately, instead of displaying the whole page entirely. It is obvious that we shouldn’t use Flash animation, because it is so outdated. We may also reduce bounce rate by improving the headline and we should create something engaging. Headlines should be punchy and encourage us to take action. It is necessary to put our call to action reasonably high and remove those stinking pop-ups. It may be hard to believe, but some people still use scrolling and flashing text. Low bounce rate could result from the use of ridiculously old design elements.
It is important to spare people from background music. There’s nothing more irritating and annoying than arriving to website that plays rendition of old songs. It is even worse if there’s no way to stop the song and users need to turn off the volume in their laptop. When people experience so much intrusion, they will close the browser tab and choose our competitors. Visitors often already play their own music when browsing the web, so we shouldn’t intrude them.