Every website owner considers it important that traffic comes to their website. Particularly for e-commerce websites – which depend on the income generated through their website – more traffic often directly translates to more revenue.
But how do you actually get more traffic to your website? There are several ways to achieve this:
- Apply search engine optimization. The good old search optimization; this is perhaps the most cost-effective way to get more traffic to your website, since it costs virtually nothing.
- Start advertising. Banners, advertisements, and links are important. Also, do not forget the power of offline advertising. This can be done through advertisements in newspapers, for example, but word-of-mouth advertising is also a powerful medium.
- Analyze your page views. Use analytics software to stay informed about what is and isn't working on your website. Analytics software can also help you check whether an advertisement is delivering the right results.
- Become active on social networks. Do not underestimate the value of social media. Social media can serve as a fast and free form of word-of-mouth advertising and can thus attract new visitors.
Bounce rate
In addition to driving more traffic to your website, it is crucial that visitors do not immediately bounce off to another website. This is where the bounce rate comes into play.
The bounce rate tells you how many initial visitors bounce to another website without navigating to other pages within your website. The bounce rate can be improved in the following ways:
- Ensure your website functions properly. No broken links or loading errors.
- Ensure your website loads quickly. When a visitor searches for a specific product via a search engine, they often click directly through to another search result if a website does not load fast enough (see also the section further down in this article about server overload).
- Make sure your website looks attractive. A website visitor decides within 50 milliseconds whether the website is interesting enough to read on.
- The user-friendliness of a website also plays an important role. A user-friendly interface and navigation provide a visitor with comfort and confidence when visiting a website. The navigation must stand out and be easy to understand.
- And finally: content, content, content... Good content motivates visitors to keep reading and delve deeper into the website. Make sure to check your sources, check your spelling, keep it short, make it interesting to read, ensure a good text structure, and last but not least: Be original!
Server overload
Another factor that can cause visitors to skip a website is server overload. When server overload occurs, there are too many requests to the web server, causing it to be unable to handle the large number of requests. As a result, the website becomes inaccessible.
A server overload can have various causes:
- A sudden surge in popularity occurs, causing a large number of visitors to come to your website all at once (in this case, the title of this article might be less applicable).
- There is a fault in the server hardware, there is insufficient RAM/CPU available, or the I/O usage is too high.
- Your server is being attacked by a DoS attack. In a DoS attack, a computer (or in the case of a DDoS, multiple computers) makes a large number of requests to a server, rendering it unable to handle other requests and sometimes even causing it to crash.
As you can see, the number of visitors coming to a website depends on a large number of aspects.
A number of useful links for optimizing your website (in English):
How to measure the effectiveness of web designs
Site speed performance