6 Ways To Reduce Your Food Truck Website Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a metric that gets used a lot when discussing websites. Unfortunately, a lot of food truck owners don’t understand how this metric applies to them. If you do a simple search on the term “bounce rate”, you’ll get a lot of articles that explain how to reduce a website’s bounce rate unfortunately, bounce rates for food trucks need to be looked at a little differently.

While there are some general bounce rate best practices, some suggested changes can both hurt food truck websites.

A high bounce rate usually falls into one of two categories:

You’re attracting the wrong kind of traffic to your food truck website, or
You’re attracting exactly the right kind of traffic to your food truck website.

Did point 2 confuse you? Most people forget about the second scenario, since most food truck websites tend to fall victim to the first.

The way you need to look at this scenario is if a user comes into your food truck website and finds exactly what they were looking for; your menu or your phone number, why should they stay a moment longer or look around on other pages?

Food truck websites that are excellent at solving information problems quickly usually have high bounce rates. Users come in, get the answers they need, and leave; but come back often. Bounce rate is often confused with exit rate, and the difference is important; bounce rate is a measure of people who bounced off a single page. Exit rate is simply a measure of the percentage of visitors who left your site from that page.

Reducing the bounce rate on pages that have the highest volume of traffic from your highest converting sources means more engaged visitors who can locate your truck or can order your catering services.

6 ways for reducing your food truck website bounce rate:

Use Clear Navigation

Don’t make your visitors feel dumb for not providing them with clear and obvious paths to get the content they may be looking for.

The most common reaction to not being able to find something that should be obvious is frustration. If you’ve ever been on a web page where you can’t figure out how or where to navigate, this is exactly how you feel.

Make sure your menu, calendar of events and contact page are easily found.

Provide Clear Messaging

You only have a few seconds to translate value to a new website visitor, so don’t make them guess. Taglines are a simple way to explain your site’s purpose in plain text. Since your food truck sells a particular type of cuisine, say it.

Speed

This pretty much goes without saying these days but nothing really effects bounce rate like having a slow loading web page.

Is Your Website Mobile Friendly

Having a mobile friendly website is critical. Websites can still be effective as long as content can be accessed and used from a mobile device or tablet.

Use Internal Search

If you don’t currently offer search functionality on your food truck website then you’re missing the boat. Internet users have become so used to search that you need to provide search functionality for an improved user experience.

Offer Helpful 404 Page

Nobody wants to think of times when their website greets users with a 404 page, but it happens.

The best things you can do to turn a negative user experience into a potentially positive one is to provide these users with the ability to find what they came looking for, this could be as simple as providing a list of your page links and search function on your 404 page. If nothing else, add a bit of humor to your 404 page design.

The Bottom Line

What have you done to lower your food truck website bounce rate? We’d love to hear what has or has not worked for you. You can share your thoughts in the comment section, our food truck forum or social media. Facebook | Twitter