Your website's bounce rate is the percentage of people who only stay for a few seconds before leaving. Naturally, when people arrive at your site and realize it's not what they were looking for, they'll leave.

But even if you've got the right content, there are other factors that will cause some people to leave.

Over at Daily Blog Tips, Daniel Scocco wrote about one way to reduce your bounce rate:

First of all get inside the control panel of your website (e.g., WordPress admin dashboard, or the equivalent on the software you are using). Now go to the section where you can tweak your CSS and other design aspects (in WordPress this is under the "Appearance" menu). Now find the line controlling the font size on your site, and increase it. That is it!

There are many case studies around the web where people used A/B testing to find how they could reduce the bounce rate, and increasing the font size works on most situations.

If your text is too small to be read easily, some visitors will just leave.

Taking that same idea a little further, anything that enhances readability should lower your bounce rate. For example:

  • Don't use ornamental fonts for your main content.
  • Make sure there's plenty of contrast between your text and background.
  • Don't use background patterns behind your text.
  • Don't cram so many ads into the page that it's impossible to find the content.
  • Use headlines, subheads, lists, etc. effectively to communicate quickly what your page (and each section of it) is about.