Boost Magento Website’s SEO by Reducing Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is one of the most crucial factors that can determine the visibility of a site on popular search engine platforms. It is defined as the percentage of site visitors that leave the site directly from the landing page without even clicking through to any other page of a site.

If you are struggling to drive web traffic to your site, boost conversion rates and generate quality leads, then there is a possibility that your bounce rate is too high. There are multiple factors for higher bounce rate, and one of them is a speed of a site.

A slow loading speed of a site, especially a Magento web store can distract your web visitors when they visit your website in real time. They may leave your site, without even giving you a chance to convert them into a potential customer.

No doubt Magento is a tremendous content management system for eCommerce solutions. But when it comes to the loading speed of a site, you need to find out the ways that can help you reduce the bounce rate and increase the flow of web traffic on your e-store. A fast loading website will automatically reduce the bounce rate and help you improve the SEO ranking of your online store.

So, let’s take a look at some of the effective tips that will improve the SEO ranking by reducing the bounce rate and boosting the conversion rate of your Magento eCommerce site.

1. Carefully select your web hosting provider

Selection of a right web hosting provider is a vital aspect when it comes to the speed of an eCommerce site. It means you can improve the performance and reduce the bounce rate of your site if you choose a suitable web hosting plan.

If you are really concerned about your eCommerce site’s loading speed, you should opt for VPS (Virtual Private Servers) hosting instead of Shared plan. For better results, you can upgrade to hosting your e-store on an Amazon hosting server.

That will improve the overall performance of your eCommerce site, which in turn reduce the bounce rate, improve the conversion rate, and increase the ranking on Google and other popular search engines.

2. Make a use of caching

Most of the web visitors leave the site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load all the elements of a web page. Nobody wants to visit a site that takes ages to load a page, and hence it becomes necessary to execute the techniques that can accelerate the loading speed of your each web page.

Caching is one of the best ways that can improve the speed of your eCommerce store with ease. It automatically stores all the elements of a web page on the browsing device when a user visits your site for the first time. So whenever a visitor comes back on your site these elements of web pages can be loaded automatically from the cache instead of the web server.

This saves time, reduces bounce rate, and gives rich user experience to your potential web customers for improved conversions.

Fortunately, Magento Enterprise Edition comes with a full page caching as a default option for product, category, and other web pages. But to enable the option, you need to go to System >> Cache Management >> Select all items > click on “Enable and hit “Submit”. Plus, there are plenty of cache extensions that can improve the loading speed of your Magento store.

3. Use of CDN

Content Delivery Network (CDN) is one of the best ways that can instantly decrease the load times of your Magento e-store. With the use of CDN, you can make sure that you are serving all the elements of your site such as product images, blog posts, JavaScripts, CSS, etc from different locations across the globe so they are delivered faster to your web customers.

Make sure that you connect your subdomain to your CDN and never host your images on their domain otherwise you will lose all backlinking possibilities. For that, you need to add a CNAME record to your DNC on a subdomain, such as cdn.mydomain.com.

4. Compress JavaScript and CSS files

Luckily Magento comes with an inbuilt feature to compress your CSS and JavaScript files into one file. By doing this, you will be able to reduce the total number of HTTP requests on your eCommerce site, which in turn improve the loading speed of your web pages.

To merge the CSS and JavaScript files, you need to go to the “System” > “Advanced” > “Developer. Under the “JavaScript Settings” and “CSS Settings”, change the dropdown to “Yes” and then hit “Save Configuration”.

After merging the files, you will need to clear the cache to speed up the loading times of your pages.

5. Optimize the Images

eCommerce sites usually contain thousands of product images to encourage web visitors to make the purchase from your site. But due to their file sizes, web pages with heavier and larger images take more time to load and this reduces the bounce rate of a site.

Therefore, it is better to minimize the file sizes of images to see your web pages to load faster. Make sure that the file size of your image is below 70kb. Also, consider the quality while optimizing your product images. You can use Adobe Photoshop software to optimize the images, without ever compromising their quality.

6. Always use the latest version

As a Magento store owner, you should always use the latest version of Magento in order to fix security issues and enjoy performance improvements. To install your Magento e-store with its latest version, you need to follow three main steps, including:

1. a)   Install the most recent version of the Magento file tree
2. b)   Run the installer from the file tree right on top of the outdated database
3. c)    Upgrade your themes and extensions to the latest version.

Note: Magento recently released its latest version.i.e, 2.1.2 that comes with jaw-dropping modifications including security improvements, functional fixes, and other important enhancements to the Sales API.

7. Enabling Flat Catalog

Magento uses the EAV model (Entity Attribute Value) to store their web customers and product data. By enabling the flat catalog for product and categories, you will be able to compress the product data into one table with ease.

This allows the MySQL queries to respond faster, which in turn boosts the performance and reduce the bounce rate with the sole aim to get better visibility on search engines.

To enable the flat catalog, you need to visit the “System” > “Configuration” > “Catalog”. Under the “Frontend”switch “Use Flat Catalog Category” and “Use Flat Catalog Product” from “no” to “YES”. Click on “Save Config.”

Conclusion

All the tips mentioned above in this blog post will help you reduce the bounce rate, increase the page load speed and improve the conversions of your site. You will also see a drastic increase in web traffic, conversion rates and sales for your Magento e-store.

In fact, fast loading sites have greater chances to get higher ranking on Google and other popular search engine platforms. So, don’t forget to optimize the speed of your site if you want to boost the SEO of your Magento eCommerce store.

Author Bio: Linda Wester is dedicated magento developer with years of experience in building highly custom websites for businesses. She is also an enthusiastic blogger who loves to dig into Magento, explore what’s possible and share his knowledge with readers.