Why is my stores bounce rate and session duration so bad?

[leebee240]

Looking for brutal and honest feedback on my store:

theindoorist.com

My stores aim is to sell clean looking, natural home decor. I thought I had done everything I needed to (reviews, add a logo, etc) but my bounce rate is usually around 80% and average session duration is 8 seconds. I often see an average session duration of 0!

I’m willing to take anything on board. Help me understand what my shop needs!

Thanks

[oscprofessional]

@leebee240

Welcome to the Shopify community.

Hope you are doing well. Here are a few suggestions.

Logo: You should need a proper logo to represent your brand. It should communicate your brand’s message, values, and identity. It should be simple, distinctive, and memorable.

Logo Size: It’s important to note that your logo does not need to be exactly 410 pixels wide by 205px high.

Front Images: Use good quality featured and right dimension banner images with call-to-action buttons to captivate user attention. It should be resized images for mobile screens.

Please read these blogs:

https://www.oscprofessionals.com/blog/shopify-image-sizes-the-ultimate-guide/

Images should be in the best format.

https://www.oscprofessionals.com/blog/how-to-specify-image-dimensions-for-shopify-images/

Homepage: Homepage designs guide your visitors around your website. To engage visitors you need to work on the homepage layout design.

Include trust indicators on the homepage. Homepage content should be strategically decided. You can add a ‘Call to action banner’ ‘New arrivals’, ‘Top selling products, Most popular collection, announcement bar, Today’s deals, and offers, etc on the homepage to engage users.

Your store should be clear navigation. The store should have easy to access the shopping cart.

Add Blog: You know creating/adding blogs gives you a great way to generate fresh content on a website and provide a catalyst for email marketing, and social media promotion to drive search traffic to your website.

Blogs build trust with your customers and improve shopify SEO ranking. Blogs can boost sales.

Trust Signals: Show off trust signals and customer testimonials to boost conversion. Customer testimonials and trust Signals build customers’ trust and help customers to feel more secure in their buying decision.

Improve SEO, links, usability, and performance score to increase conversion & sales (Your page could be better)

Check your store with the Page insight tool to get the score. because the low mobile score can kill the website traffic and lose revenue. optimizing a Shopify site for high page load speed is a major priority.

Compare your store with your competitors. Also compare your product price with others. Also check the shipping cost you are offering.

Google Search Console :

Is your website exist on the search result page? (Your brand name). If yes then it’s good to see, google is indexing and the user will reach you easily. Unless your store is completely invisible.

If you are not using the Google Search Console yet, set it up now. Google Search Console report will let you know if your pages are indexed or not at all. If none of your pages can be found by Google, then it may have an issue, as this means no organic traffic at all. And No traffic means no Conversion.

• Find the Pages, Where You Lose the Most Customers. Convert More of the Shoppers Who Put Products in Their Carts. Check your store bounce rate.
• Showcase How Popular Product Pages Are. Promote Offers With Push Notifications in the form of Popups or announcement bars. Optimize Your Product Pages.
• Look at the difference between your New Visitors and your Returning Visitors. For most Shopify stores, your returning visitors will have a much higher conversion rate than your new visitors.

You need to focus on the following points…

• Highlight product benefits clearly
• Allow guest checkout.
• Choose relevant keywords
• Identify your target customers.
• Use design to improve user experience.
• Create Content That Converts
• Mobile-friendliness
• Check bounce rate regularly
• Offer competitive prices
• Send Relevant Emails
• Make Use of First-time Offers

Hope these points will help you! We will share with you a free audit report of your store If you wish!

Visit our website to get more information :

https://www.oscprofessionals.com/search-engine-optimization/

[irene-vintage]

Hello @leebee240 ,

We had a look at your site and saw your amazing works. There is only a few things we suggest you can change to create a better customer experience.

1. Sticky header:

Make your header sticky to allow your customers access to any categories that they want while scrolling down your store site.

2. Products section:

• Add a CTA button next to each products, this can attract your customers and increase the chance of likelihood to purchase.

• The details information is being written too long, consider to make it shorter and divide them based on materials, color, size, use for, etc.

3. Testimonials:

It’s great to see you put the reviews for each products, but it’d be better if you can make a separate section on the homepage like this screenshot.

4. Pagespeed Insights:

Make sure your site speed performance is good on both desktop and mobile. If your site loading time is too long, people tend to quit and leave. You can optimize the image files, theme codes, remove any unnecessary codes or apps to improve the page speed.

Hope these can helps. Please let us know if you need any further supports.

Regards,

AliReviews team.

[PageFly-Richard]

Hi @leebee240

This is Richard from PageFly - Landing Page Builder App.

I have checked on your store, and am quite impressed with the fresh and green feelings from the color you are having on your store. It must have taken you lots of time and effort on this store - great work!

If you don’t mind, I would love to have some comments on your store, hopefully it can help you boost your conversion rate

1. General

• Footer: There are still some blank spaces where we can make use of to share more information about your store. In footer, you can consider adding short description about your store, along with your logo, so customers can get a hold of the value and mission that your store aims to achieve, thus connecting visitors with the same interest

2. Home page

• Review hero banner: Make sure that your hero banner’s image can tell what you are selling. Having an image of a plant will make it hard for visitors to be aware of the home & decor industry that you are targeting. You can consider using images that focus more on the products you are selling. Another tip is to add a heading, with short and on-point tagline about your store - a heading helps catch visitor’s attention and share your message much more effective than a description

Here is a sample from our templates that you can refer to:

• Add Call-to-action button to product list: Having a Quick View and/or an Add To Cart button on each of your products will help encourage visitors to start purchasing - without the need to be redirected to product page.

• Add more information to your home page: Visitors will only purchase on a store where they gain enough information to trust. Having more information can increase your trustworthiness, as well as increase Average Session Duration. You can consider adding:
• Testimonials: Testimonials are social proof. Each testimonial is proof that a real customer has used your product, and is telling people how that experience went. They are providing first-hand proof of using your product from a third party, someone who doesn’t gain anything from talking about it.

• Features & Benefits: It’s not only important to describe what you do, but also why it matters. Visitors want to know about the benefits of buying from you. Keep the copy lightweight and easy to read, and speak the language of your customers

• Resources: Most visitors to your website won’t be ready to buy. Make sure you offer a link to a resource center where they can learn more. This also helps establish your credibility as a thought leader in your industry

3. Collection page

• Use Load More instead of Pagination: the Load More button is more mobile-friendly in comparison to pagination. You can see it for yourself by trying Read More widget by Crocoblock. Uploading new items to the current page by clicking on the button creates the effect of endless scrolling and increases user engagement.

4. Page speed

Pagespeed is extremely crucial for both buyer’s experience and Google ranking, so you could consider Shopify themes made to help you boost Google pagespeed score for your store such as Blum, Refresh, Dawn…

I hope these suggestions can be useful for you. Good luck with increasing sales for your business!

Best regards,

Richard | PageFly team

[Cedcommerce]

Hello @leebee240 ,

Thank you for sharing the details about your store. We can see that you have put a lot of effort into making it visually appealing and optimized for performance. Also, Google Lighthouse suggests your store performance as 73, which is impressive. However, the bounce rate and low session duration indicate that visitors are not staying on your website long enough to purchase or engage with your content.

One of the possible reasons for this could be that your target audience is not clearly defined. Identifying your ideal customer and tailoring your marketing efforts to reach them effectively is essential. Without a defined target audience, your marketing efforts may not be as effective, and you may end up attracting visitors who are not interested in your products.

Another aspect that can help increase conversions is the marketing strategy. You can consider using various marketing channels, such as social media, email marketing, influencer marketing, and paid advertising, to drive traffic to your website. However, choosing the channels most likely to reach your target audience and align with your budget is essential.

Additionally, it might be helpful to analyze your website traffic and identify the pages with the highest bounce rate or lowest session duration. Understanding why visitors leave those pages quickly allows you to optimize them for better engagement and conversions.

Moreover, you can embed optimized video product descriptions, how-to-use tutorials, and video reviews that help visitors to understand your products and services in more detail and help them decide what to buy; also try to revamp your hero section with hooking images.

I hope this helps you understand what your store needs to improve its performance. Feel free to reach out if you have any further questions or need help with implementing these strategies.

Regards,

CedCommerce

[flareAI]

Hello @leebee240 ,

Good day! Gina from flareAI app - free sales machine here to assist.

I’ve taken a look at your Shopify store, and here is some feedback:

1. Add favicon to help visitors locate your page easier when they have multiple tabs open. Also it will add overall branding consistency and their absence might be seen as unprofessional.
2. Display store’s contact info like phone number, email address, and office address in the Contact Us page.
3. Create social media accounts in major channels like Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter and add those links to the footer. Social media is a great way to grow your business, allowing you to tap into new audiences and gain more customers.
4. Add a FAQ page to provide information on frequent questions or concerns
5. Try to maintain the same image size while listing all products.

6. Add a separate About Us page which is a reflection of the purpose and personality of the business.
7. Add detailed filters in collection pages to help your visitors narrow in on the specific product they’re looking for and find products they might be interested in based on certain features (e.g. size, color, category)
8. Add Blogging in the store
   Blogging is an amazing way to drive traffic to your website and increase your SEO. The more your blog, the more content the search engines have to crawl and index. This means they can easily recognize that your site is a resource of information for people to access.
9. Add sticky header
   Adding sticky header allow users to quickly access the navigation, search, and utility-navigation elements without scrolling up to the top of the page. They increase the discoverability of the elements in the header and the chance that users will take advantage of them.
10. Lack of Clear Value Proposition
    It’s not immediately clear what sets your store apart from other home decor stores. You need to clearly communicate your unique selling proposition and what makes your products special.
11. You can add testimonials on the home page to make the store look more professional. Testimonials allow your satisfied customers to step forward and address the questions and objections that fill the minds of your prospective buyers for you.
12. Add sections like ‘New Arrivals’, ‘Featured Collection’, ‘Hot Sellers’ to help keep customers updated on new products and give exposure to new collections.

Hope this will help you.

Gina

[Rayshuggs]

@leebee240 I have a few pieces of advice that I’m pretty sure you would find helpful.

1. One of your major issues right now is that people don’t spend enough time when they visit your store. One way to improve this is by placing customer testimonials on your store. This would attract the attention of customers to a very high level.

2. Add a FAQ page on the homepage, this will solve the duration issue as customers would be intrigued and could check it to find out more about your store and products which in turn could lead to them actually taking time to check them out.

3. You should consider bundling products such as matching rugs and tables together. Customers tend to lean towards these kind of bundle deals when purchasing household products and this will in turn help boost sales in your store. You should employ the aid of the Bundler- Product Bundles App in achieving this task. The app is useful in everything from constructing new bundles to peacefully demolishing them if they’re not a good fit and you can test it out for free here https://apps.shopify.com/bundler-product-bundles

[Roenboeg]

I think it would be great if @Shopify_77 could explain the technical reason why so many sessions are at 0s. I know that Shopify, runs speed tests from data centers in council bluff and Ashburn. But is that the same case for the rest.

Do we risk filtering out legit visitors if we just remove all 0s duration sessions?

[BrightLifeArt]

I’m having the same problem with largely 0 seconds ave session length. Did you come to any understandings or solutions? Thanks! Love your store and products by the way.

[BrightLifeArt]

I found this info:

https://www.quora.com/Why-more-than-90-of-vistors-click-on-the-link-and-exit-within-0-seconds-the-time-of-Shopifys-average-session-duration-is-0

What I found most interesting is the author of the article says Shopify needs a second click on the website to calculate session duration, so maybe it’s bc of no second clicks.