Don't be misled by the time on site statistics in your Google Analytics. Keep in mind that any tracking software, including Google Analytics, can only track time on site if the visitor visits more than one page. That's right, the time on a page is calculated as the difference between the landing times of different pages on the same site, so if someone comes to your landing page and goes nowhere else on the site then the visit time will be shown as 0.

So, if you're seeing an average time on site of less than 1 second, it does not mean that all your visitors are only staying on site for less than a second, it means that most do not visit more than the landing page, which, depending on the information provided on the landing page, can be a very different thing and may not indicate any problem either with your site. As an extreme example, you could be advertising a site that only has one page, in which case your time on site will always be zero, and your bounce rate 100%; this isn't a problem, it's just how the stats are calculated.

Here are 5 website design tips you can have done to your website to increase visitor time and decrease bounce rates

1. Tidy Up Your Design

Provide a user experience that is clutter free and interactive (try using a design that includes parallax). Also look at above the fold area of your website in mobile and desktop view. Your most important information and content should go up first. In other words, your website visitor should instantly see the useful part of a page when they land on your site. Keeping your site’s design simple and clutter free makes it easier for users to look at it. If there are fewer things to look at, then users are more likely to focus and stay longer.

2. Add High-Quality Images

Add high-quality images on your pages. Using commercial royalty free image libraries in your web design projects makes a big difference. Images are the most engaging form of content on the web. Website visitors love to look at images more than reading text. This is why you see most popular websites use fullscreen background images on their landing pages.

3. Add Videos for a More Interactive Visitor Experience

Adding videos always increases engagement levels on websites. Fact: People from all over the world watch hundreds of millions of hours of videos on YouTube every day. Videos are one of the most effective, interactive, and engaging forms of content. Adding videos to your website pages can boost user engagement and will increase the time users spend on your website.

4. Make Internal Linking a Habit

Make sure that each article, blog post or page on your website has plenty of internal links. Website visitors will not visit additional pages unless you link to them. Make it a habit, and you will see your bounce rate decrease and time on your website increase. vInternal linking is also good for your site’s SEO. Just make sure that you are linking to relevant articles and pages to your own website in context.

5. Target Abandoning Users

Target abandoning visitors with Exit Intent is a very popular web design trick. Unfortunately, no matter what we do as website designers and developers, website visitors are eventually going to leave your website. But that does not have to be the end of it. We can still give the website visitor one last chance to convert into subscribers or customers. Website developers, such as us, can deploy technology to target the website visitors exactly when they are about to leave your site. We can offer a special discount, ask them to subscribe, or suggest they take a look at some cool features that they might have missed. Properly targeting abandoning visitors can increase returning visitors and decrease your site’s bounce rate significantly.

Conclusion

That’s all for now, we hope these tips help you keep website visitors on your pages longer. As always if you have any questions or need help schedule a focus chat with Kenny to help firm up your website design structure.