Lowering Your Website's Bounce Rate (How Design Effects Performance)

I recently did a three month overhaul of my first client’s website (Nick the painter’s site).

There was nothing humongously wrong with the site itself. The site has been growing organically quite well on it’s own, we’ve had a few mentions around the web, and all in all traffic is increasing at about 20%-30% per month.

Looking at the analytics however, we did notice that the site average bounce rate was up around 75%. Obviously that’s not great and I began to wonder why.

• The design wasn’t that terrible was it?
• We’re building links, but are we getting them from the wrong places?
• Why are people not clicking on the contact page much?

All valid things to ask, and it was good that we asked them because it eventually lead me to the right train of thought which has made all the difference.

Read on to find out how we fixed some of the teething issues with his site.

Keigher Painting & Decorating Website

In the past I’ve been hesitant to share the website with you guys due to it being so new.

But as the site is getting more established now, I’m happy to reveal the details, here it is:

Here’s what Nick’s site did look like. This is the original design, basically replicating exactly what the client asked for:

The Problems

With the bounce rate being so high as I said, I began to wonder what could be the cause. It seemed like a lot of traffic was reaching pretty much any page and not going any further. It wasn’t just restricted to the homepage.

After some thought we decided on a few factors that could be causing the abandonment issues:

• The header contained the phone number meaning they didn’t need to go any further and explore the site.
• Customer confidence (my friend is quite young compared to other painters, he was wondering if it was a trust issue having his photo up there).
• Small design glitches, like the menu’s not being smooth and polished looking, as well as alignment issues of content areas.
• The design looking to harsh and square – poor design on my part which could be turning people away.

Proposed Solutions

I wasn’t totally convinced that it was a customer confidence issue. While he is young looking, the photograph is pleasant and he looks extremely professional and clean for a painter.

To prove it to him, I suggested we make some tweaks to the design and re-assess after a couple of months:

• Introduce a new menu item called “blog” which contains his posts on painting topics.
• Fix up the alignment issues with the content area.
• Remove the phone number from the header (I was convinced this was most of the reason for the poor click rates on the contact page and why people were abandoning on the first page so frequently).
• Round up the corners and make the design more friendly and inviting looking by getting rid of the harsh corners.

And here’s what it looks like now after the makeover:

Results

The results of the changes were quite impressive.

Less than one month later site average bounce rates have already dropped to 61%, with just 51% bounce rate on the home page which receives most of the page views.

His contact page is receiving nearly 4 times as many hits and he’s already receiving more phone calls directly resulting from the website (much to his pleasure of course).

Conclusion

This pretty much concludes the series on Nick’s website, my first real web design customer.

If you’re interested in any of my services, or would like some consulting on what to fix about your website to increase your conversion and get the most out of your website’s visitors visit my personal site and contact me.

For the rest of this series you can go back through my project archives, or refer to these links (in order of posting):

1. Setting Up My Web Design Mini Business [Case Study]
2. Domains, Hosting and Making It All Repeatable
3. The Lazy Mans Guide To Designing Your Customer’s Website
4. Lowering Your Website’s Bounce Rate (How Design Effects Performance)

Thanks for reading this series! I’ll update it if there’s any more developments, but in the mean time, keep your eye’s peeled for more project news coming soon.

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