How to Increase Time on Site
OVERVIEW
The amount of time your audience stays on your site is a good indication of the value they perceive your site to have. Short durations tend to indicate that both your website design and your content are lacking and your audience doesn’t feel like you have much to offer them. When visitors drop by and leave seconds after arriving, you’ll see this reflected in high bounce rates and low time-on-site including low e-commerce conversions. This delicate inverse relationship should be one of your top priorities when designing your website—keep your bounce rates low and your conversion rates high.
The industry standard for time on site is two to three minutes. If the majority of your audience isn’t meeting this mark, you should consider redesigning or restructuring your website in ways that optimize engagement and ease of use. Here we’ve outlined how to increase time on site with six important steps to consider integrating into your design and execution.
CLEAN UP YOUR WEBSITE DESIGN
When it comes to web design, first impressions matter most. Audiences make the decision to either stay on your website or leave it almost immediately after visiting your homepage. It takes only a handful of seconds for audiences to decide whether they will get value out of your website. Therefore, you need to ensure your pages are laid out in a clean, straightforward, and user-friendly way and are easy to navigate and engaging to your target audience. Don’t over clutter your pages and make sure to use clean, clear page headers. Design for your reader.
CONSIDER YOUR CONTENT
After you’ve made sure your website design is easy to use, visually appealing, and user-friendly, you need to also ensure your content is up to par and adds value to your website. With such a short amount of time to convince site visitors to stick around, your value proposition needs to be clear and precise to your target audience.
Make sure to use titles and subheadings to breakdown a page so that if a reader is scanning, they can easily find the content they’re after. This will also boost your SEO. The ideal website should contain a mixture of short-form and long-form content and your aim should be to have a reader stay on your pages for a minimum of two to three minutes per page. If they’re only opening a page just to leave it milliseconds after, you need to think through why that might be.
MAKE IT MULTIMODAL
Audiences nowadays expect a lot when it comes to viewing a website and they crave multimodal sites that allow them to interact with different types of content. Where it makes sense, include a mixture of images, videos, and potentially even audio. When adding mixed media, make sure your images or videos are of high quality. Images should be clear and crisp—no pixelation should be present and they should be high resolution. When your audience has endless choices at their fingertips, your website needs to provide them with a distinctive value over your competitors or they will move on to the next proposition.
LINK INTERNALLY
The best outcome for your website is that visitors come to your site and linger on a page before jumping onto another internal page—making a purchase, reading the content you’ve shared, or subscribing. Ideally, they will open a few different pages on your website and consume the different types of content available to them. To make this happen, link internally wherever possible. If you’re writing a blog post, link a word or phrase back to another blog post that shares different content. Adding internal links will also help your SEO ranking, which will enable more readers to find your website and interact with it.
MAKE IT MOBILE FRIENDLY
Due to today’s technology landscape, you can guarantee that the majority of users will use their mobile phones to access your site whether they’re accessing it by linking from your Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest account. Since readers are used to the ease of logging onto their mobiles and reading from bed, public transportation, or the comfort of their couch, you need to make sure your website design is mobile-friendly and looks just as good on a phone or a tablet as it does on a laptop.
USE ANALYTICS
You can experiment and play around with all these ideas, but when making changes, be sure to monitor the analytics for insight into why something might be occurring. When you better understand what your target audience wants, you can learn how to tailor your site specifically to those readers.
If making changes, try to test out certain aspects by only making a small change and then proceeding to monitor it. That way, it becomes easier to interpret the data you get. Overall, be thoughtful with your content and make sure that your audience is getting value out of it, no matter the adaptations you make.