6 Best Practices Proven to Increase the Time Visitors Spend on Your Website

“Bounce rate” is one of the most important statistics you can look at to evaluate the strength or weakness of your website. It’s a simple percentage: how many users leave your site after looking at only one page? If you have a high bounce rate, there’s a problem. You’re not keeping people’s attention long enough to convert them from visitors into customers. The practices discussed below have been shown to increase the time users spend on sites.

1. Keep Navigation Clear

People need to know how to get around your site. They shouldn’t feel like they have to rummage through each page to find what they’re looking for. Simple, well-organized menus do a lot to improve user experience and keep people on your site. And make sure they’re accessible from any page. You don’t want to have “dead end” pages on your site that don’t lead anywhere.

2. Improve Readability

Having your font too small or poorly contrasted with your background color will send your bounce rate through the roof. Web users have no patience for sites that they can’t scan and parse easily. This means elegant but legible typefaces and content broken up into easily digested segments, with clear headings to let readers know what they’re looking at.

3. Include Social Proof

Trustworthiness is at the top of the list of qualities people look for in websites, and one way you can make your site or company appear reliable and credible is through social proof. Adding short testimonials to your landing page does a lot to demonstrate your company can be trusted, especially if you pair the testimonials with thumbnail pictures for a touch of humanity.

4. Don’t Skimp on Longform Content

While clickbait headlines and listicles might increase overall traffic, these types of short, ephemeral articles don’t keep people invested, and aren’t likely to send them looking through your other content. Lengthier articles not only keep people onsite longer because they take longer to read, they also build stronger associations between your site and quality content, meaning readers will be more inclined to explore your site further when they’re done reading.

5. Tell A Story

Building a narrative on your site makes readers or customers feel like they’re part of something. Connecting the content on your site with a larger mission or storyline keeps people onsite longer, especially if you can find a way of including them in the story you’re telling.

6. Include A Clear Call to Action

This ties in nicely with the previous suggestion. The story you’re telling ought to progress inevitably toward a successful conversion. Including a button on each page of your site that encourages users to make a purchase with a strongly-worded call to action will dramatically increase your conversion rate and decrease bounce rate.

Even if your site isn’t selling products, higher bounce rates mean less advertising revenue. If you’d like to keep people on your site longer and see those clicks turn into currency, you can start with these tips.