So I manage a site with a bounce rate above 80%. It's built on WPress. When I first loaded up the website on my computer, I remember it froze my Windows 7 machine for about 10 seconds. After that first time, it hasn't frozen since then or on any other computer I've viewed it on. I'm curious if other people are experiencing this same freezing effect and are just closing the tab before the site loads. That would explain the low bounce rate and the fact that 99% of people show up as a 0:00 time spent on page (according to Google analytics.) Could I have a brave few click on the site and let me know if you experience a freezing effect? Please include your OS and browser. Thanks! Here is the site: http://wollardlegal.com
It may be caused by a plugin you use, a slow web hosting provider, large images, or a lot of other issues.I opened your web site on my Windows 7 64 + IE and it works fine, loaded a bit slow initially but it seems it's usable enough.
may be your website takes too long when it loaded or opened by your visitor or some of your script loading hidden content, in some case your script not written correctly.
I'd be surprised you're getting visits or ranking, since near as I can tell it should be slapped down for abuse. The markup is the worst kind of gibberish, from multiple H2's that aren't the starts of subsections, to H2 preceeding H1, to tags and attributes (like target) that have no business being used on websites written after 1998. Of course, it's a turdpress template -- meaning you're automatically saddled with fat, bloated slow code that's poorly written. What with the HTML 5 doctype idiocy without actually using HTML 5 for anything, endless IE conditionals for style showing that whoever wrote the CSS doesn't know enough to have created the layout, (especially since it's just for a dropdown menu -- serious herpaderp), the overstuffed keywords that's automatically ignored (even when keywords was used) thanks to being too large with zero relevance (oh yeah, the code made by that SEO pack rubbish is SO useful), static STYLE inlined in the markup, pointlessly redundant TITLE attributes, empty paragraphs either doing padding's job or just wasting space, comment placements (yes, I said comments) that could be tripping rendering bugs in FF or IE... ... and that's without talking about the accessibility disaster caused by the fixed width layout, fixed metric (pixels) fonts, illegible color contrasts, incomplete font stacks, menu that's broken when scripting is disabled, endless pointless slow loading scripting for NOTHING... I could go on for quite a while. I mean this: <h2>Bill Wollard, Attorney, C.P.A., L.L.M. (Tax)</h2> <h1>Dallas Area Estate Planning Attorney</h1> <p> <br /> Welcome to the website for the Law Office of Bill Wollard. I’ve been helping clients plan their futures since 1993. My areas of practice are <strong><a title="Wills" href="http://wollardlegal.com/practice-areas/wills">Wills</a>, <a title="Trusts" href="http://wollardlegal.com/practice-areas/trusts">Trusts</a>, <a title="Probate and Estate Administration" href="http://wollardlegal.com/practice-areas/probate">Probate</a>, <a title="Guardianship" href="http://wollardlegal.com/practice-areas/guardianship">Guardianship</a>, <a title="Asset Protection" href="http://wollardlegal.com/practice-areas/asset-protection">Asset Protection</a></strong>, and <strong><a title="Business Planning" href="http://wollardlegal.com/practice-areas/business-planning">Business Planning</a></strong>.</p> <p> </p> Code (markup): Is just mind-numbingly bad code... since it's using extra P to do what P should already be doing, has a h2 before the h1 (numbered headings are to indicate the start of subsections of the lower numbered heading BEFORE it, h1 in the middle of the page is rubbish), absolute URL's for no reason, pointless use of TITLE (usually if you have to use TITLE on an anchor, there's something wrong with the content of the anchor), and adding "more emphasis" (strong) to elements that grammatically should not be emphasized. Which is how you end up with 15k of HTML doing 8 to 10k's job. I can comfortably say that at least 30% of the code should go in the trash. You've got a laundry list of why I say that businesses should NOT use off the shelf solutions for their websites. Things like turdpress are great for sleazing out a little personal blog; it is NOT something I would suggest for what appears to be a static website... Though do NOT obsess on bounce rate given the nature of this site! What reason do users have to go to any of your sub-pages on the average visit? Do you have some method of tracking conversions? I'd point out it also has some usability failings -- IF you're having bounces, that means they might not even be finding your phone number or address by going to the location page; Information that to be frank should be in a much more prominent spot on the landing page than in the flow text. Your copy of Wordpress needs to be gutted down more, or you need a better custom solution for your business. What I see right now, I'd call and expense... you need to turn that expense into an investment.
Well rikcs, in your case there may be many reasons for this thing.... Promoting website in Wrong Categories in Social Media, Purchasing Traffic to increase visitors... If you are doing SEO or have someone to do that job for you then he might be giving you this hard time... If everything is Ok I would suggest you reading a worthy information in this article about how you can decrease your bounce rate and how visitors visit websites,,, http://www.squidoo.com/heat-map This would help you to get better results for sure... Regards
Bounce rate never relates with Website error. It's all depend on the nature of a visitor to your website.
That's something I hinted at but should have better covered -- literally, bounce just means they visited your home page, then left... that could be a GOOD thing, means they found all they were looking for and didn't feel the need to go to sub-pages. The site in question is a glorified advertisement, as such one questions if it should even waste time on all those extra pages. More important numbers to consider would be visits and conversions... though scaling those numbers into something meaningful would really hinge on knowing more about the competition.
its due to the site is not user friendly, if the user not interested in the site bounce rate will increase, so better make design good with quality content that attracts peoples attention
Deathshadow, thanks for the harsh yet honest assessment of the site. I will take your advice into consideration - the person that coded the theme was new to Wordpress so I may need to have someone redo it. Does no one think the majority of visitors having a 0:00 time on my site is kind of odd? That's why I thought there was something on the site that was freezing computers. Has no one experienced that when loading the site for the first time?
What are you using to track it? Keep in mind, I might show up as a 0:00 since I have javascript blocked by default; a LOT of people disable it and/or enable it on a site-by-site basis using things like Opera (which has it built in) or the noscript plugins for the various other browsers out there. A LOT of these tracking systems fall flat on their face in the face of that -- google analytics amongst them... just like a lot of the 'scripting for nothing' asshattery people seem to be bloating out their websites with for nothing of late. Of course, I say that if you're spending time worrying about what google analytics tells you as opposed to what can be gleaned from the server logs with tools like webalizer or analog, you're probably wasting time that could be better spent adding unique content of value that will draw visitors. Something which -- again, to be frank -- this type of site wouldn't have in the first place. It's a website for an attorney, it's a glorified yellow pages listing... Honestly wasting space on much more than specializations, name, address and phone number is probably just a waste of bandwidth and effort.
Google Analytics. This is the only site I manage that has a bunch of 0.00s. I will check webalizer to see if there are inconsistencies.
Be warned, webalizer doesn't track bounces -- in general, 'bounce' is a very hard number to track since there's little way to really say what the user is doing... It's a bit.. arbitrary a measurement. More so since you can't rely on client side scripting or even storage to accurately track users. It's like trying to track conversions when you don't actually have a product.