Weekly Links Roundup – Bounce Rate, CDN, Color Gradients, Polls

The top website and marketing links of the week.

Do you know your website’s bounce rate? It’s a metric you can find in Google Analytics or other analytics software, and it measures the number of visitors who come to a page on your site but then leave before visiting any other pages. You could have a lot of traffic but not a lot of conversions if you have a high bounce rate. Learn how to lower it here.

Is your site slow? I talk frequently about slow sites because they are such a big problem for so many small businesses. If yours is slow, and you have a large geographic reach (think national instead of local), then a CDN may help speed up your site. A CDN (content delivery network) may help because it serves static files like images and video from servers that are closer to your site visitors (less distance = faster response). This article is focused on WordPress but CDNs are available for any website platform.

If you’re planning for a new look for your website or other marketing tools, check out this post on the trendiness of gradients over flat colors.

Finally… if you want to increase reader engagement in your email newsletter, consider adding an interactive element like a poll. Polls are supported in the big newsletter platforms including Constant Contact and Mailchimp.