Bounce rate reduced from 70% to 44%
One thing that became quickly obvious when Calcatraz launched was that the site had a high bounce rate. At 70% it seemed to be fairly average for an unoptimised site. But it meant that for every ten people who visited the site, only 3 were actually sticking around.
I decided to try and reduce the bounce rate for the home page http://www.calcatraz.com. With a few quick, simple changes I was able to reduce the bounce rate to just 44% (meaning for every 10 visitors 5 1/2 actually entered a calculation). This almost doubles the amount of visitors who actually choose to interact with the site. These changes were:
- Speeding up the load time. First I halved the file size of the logo from 6kb to 3kb. Then I inlined the CSS style definitions into the main file (to remove the need to have separate requests for the CSS). Finally I enabled HTML compression which causes the server to compress the page from 3kb to 1kb before sending it to the user. The end result was a significant decrease in the time it takes the main page to load for the user. This change reduced the bounce rate from 70% to about 55%.
- Providing the user with a better idea of how to use the calculator. I added the descriptive phrase ‘The free online calculator’ under the logo, and provided examples of valid calculations under the calculation entry box.
- Providing the user with easy ways to interact with the calculator. For users who don’t have a specific calculation in mind, I converted the example calculations into links so they can just click on them and Calcatraz will work it out for them. This reduces the barrier to entry for users coming to the site.
I’m still testing the changes described in 2 and 3 with Google website optimiser so they don’t currently appear for all users. However, I will very soon be implementing them as the main front page as they are significantly outperforming the alternative which does not have these features. After that I’ll continue to make refinements to improve the bounce rate as I suspect it can be reduced still further.
