By Neal Taparia - 12/15/2021
One day, a family member told me that she loved playing jigsaw puzzles, but could never take her puzzles on the go with her. I told her I would look into it and see if there was a way to build an online jigsaw platform.
After all, we had already built a couple of games. So when I told Darshan about this idea and space, we knew we had to get into it.
Once we started running im-a-puzzle, we knew from past experience we could improve engagement.
When we analyzed our existing traffic, we were happy with its results. In fact, our bounce rate averaged around 41% which was similar to other gaming sites. But when we looked at competitors using Similar Web, we saw that they had lower bounce rates. We thought we could do better.
And yes! We did. So, here’s how we got the number down to as low as 25%.
Initially, we assumed that if a visitor bounced from the site quickly, there must have been something wrong with our design.
To find out what was going on, we decided to measure the loading time of our site. We discovered that it’s taking over 4 seconds for almost half of visitors to load a page.
We then started to fix this problem with speed. Today, it is already helping us achieve less bounce rate and more sessions per visitor. We went from 41% down to 37% just like that.
We knew that mobile users represented 30% of our community, so we decided to optimize the site to make it easier for them to use. Our mobile bounce rate was over 50% — significantly higher than our new average of 37%. We had to fix that.
Our game was almost illegible in horizontal orientation. So, when we increased the size of the puzzles on mobile, our mobile bounce rate improved.
We also ensured that the puzzles took up the entire screen when they were viewed horizontally and vertically, thereby making the puzzle interaction easier. This change led to an overall bounce rate reduction to 33%!
Previously, we had a homepage with a few examples of puzzles. This design did not stand out as much to show users all the puzzles they can play, so we incorporated a library of puzzles which we’d rotate regularly. This change resulted in a bounce rate drop of about 31%.
While our users love solving puzzles, after doing some research we realized they also wanted to create their own puzzles.
We had this functionality all along, but only highlighted it in our navigation. Once we made the ability to create a puzzle a main call to action on the homepage, we found that this reduced our bounce rate to 29%!
We found that users sought out the shadow button for assistance, but it was placed under a menu of options. Given users liked this feature, we took it out of the menu and made it its own button, easily surfacing it to users
This resulted in 25% more people clicking on the shadow button and a 25% drop in our bounce rate.
Bounce rate is a key metric. All the traffic in the world won’t help you if people don’t engage with your website or app.
We've explained in great detail how to improve your site's bounce rate in this article. We even implemented similar improvements across our other sites and have seen improvements in engagement.