Can a clean website structure reduce bounce rates?

Your website is the first point of contact between your business and prospective customers.

You'll be surprised how much your business can grow if you spend your time and resources optimizing the structure of your website.

That’s because a clean website structure gives you a unique advantage. After all, it increases user engagement, and conversion rates, and boosts your competitive advantage.

Once you have that, you can do anything: sell products, sell services, partner with other companies, connect with powerful people, etc.

In this post, we’ll discuss how a clean website structure reduces bounce rates and what you need to do, fix, and implement.

Let’s get started.

What’s a clean website structure?

This is an approach in web designing that focuses on the simplicity, clarity, and functionality of a website in that, it is easier to scan and navigate.

The goal here is to offer the web visitors the information they’re looking for and build trust in your other marketing objectives like purchasing products or services and so on.

And since we’re talking about bounce rates, this approach minimizes clutter, focuses on important elements, and offers users a priceless and enjoyable browsing experience.

Most of what can be done to make a website structure clean will be discussed later in this post, but for now, let’s move to the next section.

What are bounce rates?

Bounce rate is the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and did not proceed with any further action or to other pages in the website.

How does a bouncing rate happen? There are two scenarios;

• The visitor did not find what they were looking for
• The page was too difficult to navigate
  

If that happens, then the bounce rate of your site goes high making it unsustainable to be in business.

That’s especially true if the success of your site depends on users viewing more than one page like news articles, product pages, or your checkout process.

It is also important to note that, if you have a single-page website, the bouncing rate might be super high but it should not cause any alarm at all as it is expected.

So it's clear that having a congested site (unclean) can hurt your conversion rates causing a higher bouncing rate.

This also means a clean website structure can reduce bounce rates for your site impacting your lead generation and sales process.

How Do You Know Your Bouncing Rate is High?

As a website owner, it is important to keep a close eye on the performance of your website so you don’t shoot in the dark.

One way of doing that is by looking at your analytics. Try using free tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to discover how web visitors behave once they land on your site.

The bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of unengaged visitor sessions by the total number of sessions.

Bounce rate = # unengaged sessions / total # of sessions

So, if your site has a 70% engagement rate, then your bounce rate is 30%.

According to industry studies, a good bounce rate is around 40% or lower while 60% or higher may be an indication that your site is not accessible by users and needs to be fixed.

So what does this mean to your business and what impact does a high bouncing rate have on your SEO?

Although the bouncing rate is just a piece of metric, it touches on key SEO things that should make you concerned.

For example, it exposes symptoms of poor user experience such as:

• Slow loading speed
• Poor mobile optimization
• Low-quality webpage design
• A mismatch between content and keywords

SEOs will tell you, that such things will hurt your SEO, affect your rankings and traffic, ultimately impacting your lead generation process and revenue making it a no-brainer when someone asks you to fix them.

Great, in the next section, we’ll take you through proven ways to improve your site's bounce rate.

Let’s do this.

How Can You Reduce Bounce Rates

In this section, we’ll discuss things you can do (for your site structure) to make it clean and help you reduce bouncing rates.

The first one.

#1. Make sure the page is well-linked to the rest of the site

Internal links are somewhat important for SEO and making your website structure clean.

For example, a well-linked site can lead visitors to other important pages within your website that may compel them to make purchases, subscribe, or take any desired action instead of bouncing.

Secondly, it can equitably transfer or distribute link juice across the website in the case of link building for SEO which ultimately increases your rankings, and if the site is well-linked, can retain those visitors and convert them into your customers.

Here is an example of our blog post linking to the landing page of one of our tools.

When linking the pages on your website, consider the following, for best practices:

• Use descriptive anchor text that accurately describes the content of the linked page
• Keep anchor text brief but informative (2-7 words is ideal)
• Link to relevant pages using contextual links within the body content
• Avoid linking the same anchor text to multiple different URLs
• Use a reasonable number of internal links per page (3-5 is generally recommended)
• Link to important pages like the homepage, contact page, etc. from multiple locations
• Use hierarchy in your linking structure, linking higher-level pages to more specific pages
• Ensure internal links point to URLs that exist on your site
• Use relevant internal links to guide users through the conversion funnel
• Review and update internal links regularly to remove broken links
• Consider using breadcrumb navigation to supplement internal linking
• Leverage internal linking for better search engine crawling and indexing

The key goal here is to provide a good user experience for bouncing rate reduction with relevant links in context, while also optimizing for search engines and site architecture.

#2. Improve your page loading speed

Internet users want to get solutions to their problems in an instant. If they want to learn about something or make a purchase, they want to do so quickly (if they have made up their minds).

That’s why optimizing your page speed loading is important if you want to reduce bounce rates on your site from customers who exit because they cannot stand waiting for your site to load.

The first point to understanding your page speed is using tools like the Legiit GMSD dashboard.

It gives you a page speed report that shows how fast your website loads and all the core web vitals like LCP (which we’ll discuss later).

Generally, a speed score like the one above is good and the following is not good.

Here is what Google says about the page speed score.

So what we’re saying is that a good page speed score is important because it makes the user experience seamless and that way, they’re able to remain on your site for a long time, taking action on your desired goals, reducing the bouncing rates.

To reduce load time, consider factors such as:

• The type of files you include on your site
• Whether you should compress files on your page
• Your JavaScript and whether it slows down rendering
• HTTP requests
• Third-party resources
• Server settings
• Front-end techniques, and
• Leveraging a CDN
  

With these, you can significantly reduce page bloat and improve load times.

#3. Use engaging images and videos to drive engagement

We’ll refer a lot to the above section, so pay close attention.

You need to add relevant and optimized images and videos on your site to encourage people to remain on your site to achieve a good bounce rate.

However, if you add tons of images and videos that are not optimized, this will hurt your load time and page speed leading to a bad bouncing rate.

This is demonstrated by Google through the Largest Contentful Paint metrics which are render time of the largest image or text block visible in the viewport, relative to when the user first navigated to the page.

If your LCP is huge (above 2.5 seconds), then your site needs improvement and you can do this by optimizing your images and videos.

When optimizing images and videos for a clean website structure and reducing bounce rates, here are some key factors to consider:

• Compress images to reduce file sizes without sacrificing quality
• Self-host videos on your server or use a video hosting platform like YouTube/Vimeo
• Load critical content first, before images/videos
• Test site performance on different browsers/devices
  

Next.

#4. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

Mobile traffic accounts for more than half of all web traffic worldwide making it a no-brainer in optimizing your site to work well on phones and tablets to reduce bounce rates.

You can do this by:

• Implementing a responsive design that automatically adjusts layout, content, and visuals based on the device's screen size and orientation.
• Designing and developing your website with a mobile-first mindset, prioritizing the clear navigation from the start, rather than retrofitting a desktop site for mobile.
• Ensuring buttons, links, and interactive elements are large enough for comfortable tapping with fingers on touchscreens.
• Using larger font sizes, adjusting line heights, and ensuring sufficient color contrast for improved readability on smaller mobile screens.
  

#5. Ensure high-quality, relevant landing pages

Landing pages introduce new web visitors on their decision-making journey to your site.

This makes it important to optimize them with relevant keywords and ads to avoid misleading them to different pages which can increase bounce rates.

Lastly, ensure that your call to action on the landing pages is relevantly placed within the content that the visitor is consuming to give them a clear direction.

What we mean here is that, if the user came into the landing page expecting to see links to products that they’re interested in, give them that than linking them to blogs instead.

Again, while on your page, ensure you reduce disruptions that might affect user engagement on the site such as pop-ups and unnecessary ads.

Doing this will improve the overall user experience and ensure that your site meets the needs and expectations of your visitors.

#6. Make your content more accessible with smart formatting

The content on your page should be more clear and readable by your target audience.

Otherwise, no one is willing to take an hour trying to understand what you’re saying in your text.

To make it accessible, you need to follow certain formatting rules and best practices:

• Use headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs to make the content easy to scan.
• Keep your content fresh and up-to-date to encourage repeat visits.
• Give your content room to breathe by using lots of white space around your text.

Additionally, it is wise to add a table of contents such that whenever a user gets to your page, they only read what they’re interested in rather than skim through the whole text looking for one thing.

Like this.

#7. Use sidebar widgets and promotions sparingly

Website widgets like banners, pop-ups, online forms, and sidebar sliders let you engage your visitors effectively...if you know how to use them.

However, if your site has lots of them, then it’s going to do the same thing—increase your bounce rates.

Always, as a best practice, consider the placement, timing, frequency, and functionality of the widgets on your site to reduce bounce rates from users who get frustrated when browsing your site.

Final Thoughts

So, yes, a clean website structure can reduce bounce rates for your site.

In this post, we discussed what a clean website structure is, tied it with bounce rates, and eventually discussed what you can do to clean your website structure to reduce bounce rates.

Over to you now.