Speed or Content

Hi,

My site has been up for a while now. I use Google Analytics to track my traffic. There is one thing that bothers me...It's the bounce rate of my site. What's the "normal" bounce rate? What's consider to be high?

I have some issue with the speed of my site before. People said it took them long time to load my site. I have ask the internet provider to move my site to another server.

How can I check the speed of my site from different places?

I plan to do more advertisement of my site later on, I don't want traffic to come then leave becuz the pages can't load.

Thanks a lot.

I think this is what your looking for: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

I use it all the time, it gives pretty detailed info about page load times and where the problems might be.

I think upto 50% bounce rate is acceptable,but more than that is a thing to worry about.


Hosting server is not always responsible for slow loading.
* May be your site has some heavy flash files or you are using some software which is not supported in all the browsers.
* May be the user's internet speed is slow.

You can ask your friends and relative in other places to brows the site.

Finally I would like to mention possible factors of high bounce rate.

1. Speed: I have already mentioned about that.
2. Content: May be visitors are not getting the content they want in your site.
3. Link:
a) Suppose you have a site on fishing informations,but content in your site is limited.So, to give your users access to some extra resource you gave links to some authority sites in your sector.In that case also the bounce rate will be high as visitors are leaving your site and going to the authority sites.
b) Some times webmasters are using such a anchor text for inbound links from other site,which mislead the visitors.
Suppose you ave a site on fishing in florida,but your anchor text in inbound links are "world fishing".A person who wants information about fishing in bangkok,can come to your site through that link.That person will leave your site early,coz you don't have info on fishing in bangkok.

Look into these factors and try t rectify the error.
Good Luck

Thanks DanielR for the website, very useful : D. I checked mine and it seems to be fine. That's a great news to me.

Thanks new_seo, I will take all the factors that you have suggested into account. Good to know that upto 50% Bounce Rate is acceptable.

I just found this on Wiki, like to share with you guys,

Avinash Kaushik, Google's Analytics Evangelist states, "it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying."