12 Smart Ways To Keep Your Visitors Stay Longer On Your Website

Starting your own website is way easier than driving in traffic and maintaining great rapport with your customers via e-mails and social networking sites. You want visitors to love your site in terms of its content and offering along with its visual appeal. Since you want to educate your visitors about your brand to build yourself as a trustworthy company, then you will have to target quality visitors.

While you are doing your best in building up your brand online, you may still be coping to drive in quality traffic for your website. You may have chosen best hosting services, posting in great content, have installed all of the major social media icons and have been promoting your website outrageously. But when it comes to bounce rate, you are unable to push it down.

If you are not aware of what it is, then you must know that bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter your site and then navigate away without viewing other web pages. As per many Internet gurus, a good bounce rate should fall between 25 to 50 percent and if it goes higher than this, then this is an indication that it is time to change the way your website looks and augment the navigation experience on the user’s end. If you want to lower your website’s bounce rate and implement new design theme, then you need to start today with these 12 smart ways to keep your visitors stay longer on your website:

1. Organize Your Design

Gone are the days when the glittery stuff on the Internet attracted large number of visitors. Don’t play excessively with animated images, excess designing and borders, etc. Try to keep your website simple and elegant and choose a sober colour and background theme, all of which represents your company as a believable brand. It is said that it just takes 15 seconds for any visitor to decide whether to stick on your website or not. So remember, first impression is the last impression. Keep your website and content organized and see your bounce rate lowering.

2. Keep Font Size Readable

This is yet another reason why your visitors are not preferring to explore your website. If you have chosen small font sizes, then it can impact the choice of the readers and they may choose to find similar content from other sites. Additionally, if the font size is too large, then the readers may not have a good opinion about your website. You need to portray yourself as a professional website that delivers high quality content to its readers in most appropriate manner. Maintain the font sizes to the optimal level to ensure that your visitors are not having a bad time in reading your content.

3. Reduce The Number Of Fonts

If in a particular web page you have used multiple fonts for explaining a single content, then your visitors will perceive that your website is probably an immature one. It can seem out of date to your viewers, owing to which they may click the back button immediately. You must avoid using more than two fonts in a particular page so that your content does not cause a pain in the eye and mind of the readers.

4. Avoid Writing Without Proper Breaks

While you are focusing on your web content’s font size, you must also know that big paragraphs without proper breaks are a strict no-no. You need to enhance the readability quotient of your content by maintaining proper breaks and adding appropriate headings and sub headings with suitable numbered or bulleted lists. By doing so, your content will look managed and sophisticated and will give the viewer a proper idea of what the content is all about.

5. Add Suitable & Contemporary Images

Images are an integral part of any influential website. In childhood, you too loved to read stories when you found the images to be eye capturing. Similarly, you must make use of suitable images that are contemporary so that the viewers can easily relate them with the content. Show realistic pictures and situations instead of using paintings or forged images to leave a lasting impact on the visitors’ mind.

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6. Show Creativity In Images

While website with good amount of attractive and content supporting images score high from visitors but you cannot convert your professional website or blog into a photo album. You need to make creative and innovative images using photoshop tools and customise them to blend with your website’s motto. The more you use such tools to make your images go with the trend, the more it will ensure attention of the visitors.

7. Connect With Your Visitors

Another great way to lower the bounce rate is by connecting with your visitors. You can easily establish connection with your viewers by asking provoking questions in your posts and even telling them to comment their true suggestions and opinions. Let the website to open comment section in a different page and this will increase multiple page views and eventually cause a decline in bounce rate.

8. Mention Relevant Internal Links

If your visitors get the information they want on the same page they land in your website, then there are high chances that they will navigate immediately after reading it. But you can prevent them from hitting the back or close button by mentioning related internal links along with the content so that the links attract further attention of the visitors and then they start surfing within your website through these internal links.

9. Add Statistics

No doubt your website seems professional and content filled with facts when you incorporate neatly designed statistics in support of the data. It has been always seen that people tend to get attracted with the information presented in tabular forms or in statistics and they can easily trust your website. By adding statistics, you will surely grab more attention of your visitors, thereby reducing the bounce rate.

10. Allow External Links To Open In A New Window

If your website HTML settings cause the external links to open in the same page by default, then this is one of the major reasons why your website has higher bounce rate. To keep your visitors attentive on your website, you need to change the default settings to ensure that all the external links are opened in new windows.

11. Write Your Content Like A Story

One of the best ways to keep your readers engaged in your website is by moulding your way of writing. Try to converse with the readers by expressing your words in the form of a story and your story based content will highly impact the mental alertness of the readers inducing them to read more of your content. This is why most websites are coming up with blog sections as blogs have emerged as the most favourite form of reading articles on the Internet.

Recommended: The Best Tips for Creating the Most Engaging Blogs

12. Use Pop Ups To Stop Visitors From Navigating

If you are still wanting to lower the bounce rate then you can make use of the exit intent technology.  This kind of program opens a pop up window whenever your viewers click the back button or try to close the window. With these pop ups, you can lure your viewers to have great deals and discounts or free subscription for a month or so and thereby, retain your visitors on your website.