The war against high user bounce rates is ongoing for anyone who does their business online. Regardless of the type of online business your website deals with, there is always the matter of ensuring consumers are engaged enough to stay on site until they find what they came for. Often, consumers find a page through organic search or referral, quickly establish that it does, or does not, have what they were looking for, and leave, resulting in an increase to bounce rates.
Here’s a link to another great article about bounce rates.
This issue can be addressed in many different ways, and it is something that your company as a whole should be aware of. For front end employees engaging in marketing campaigns, SEO, and content creation are ways to actively combat climbing or high bounce rates. While in the back end, one way programmers and developers may try to address this issue is to bypass it altogether through the use of Single Page Applications (SPA).
With the ever increasing power of client site machines and browsers, the shift of web site compute power away from the server side is a logical progression. The days where client machines were kept virtually at the level of a terminal are gone, and the way of the future of web development looks to SPA.
By using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), to load all the data required to power the page, the initial load of the page can be drastically reduced, especially for data heavy web pages that include data analytics or search results.
The concept of a SPA is not a new one, and has in fact been used for years in the web development community. The benefits of avoiding page refreshes and page traversal have outweighed the cost associated with running a JavaScript heavy SPA web page. By using asynchronous communication with the web server, the page can be dynamic and cover every case in which a page refresh would normally be required.
There are a few issues surrounding SPA’s such as those that arise from the unchanging URL through traversal of a SPA site. These issues can be mostly solved by using the hash fragment scheme to differentiate between different emulated pages within a single SPA. The hash fragment scheme is also useful internally to create a state model to separate the data and logic for each emulated page.
To many web developers, thinking of the extensive use of JavaScript can bring about terrible feelings of dread that may stop them in their tracks, but fear not. Through the use of comprehensive JavaScript libraries, designed to be used in SPA’s, the experience can be drastically improved.
One such popular library is AngularJS which breaks open the barriers of static HTML pages by using one, and two way, dynamic data binding to update the page seamlessly. This is only one of many extremely powerful tools that AngularJS brings to the table, but every tool has its drawbacks, and AngularJS is no exception.
The documentation and best practices surrounding it are hard to come by and can be hard to decipher. In nearly every programming forum many confused programmers can be found praying for one of the AngularJS masters to come out of the ether and impart their great wisdom upon them.
Keeping the dramatics to a minimum, AngularJS can be a tricky to understand and may take a while to learn, but there are some great tools out there to help with the process. A couple such learning tutorials I would recommend are:
Codecademy(www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-angularjs)
w3schools(www.w3schools.com/angular/)
Both of these sites offer hands on, easy to follow lessons which cover enough material to get started using single page applications and AngularJS. Keep in mind, these are not the only tools for AngularJS, and AngularJS may not be the best suited library for your use case. There are many SPA libraries available which may be better given different situations.
So before you jump into a new project, it may be worth doing some research into SPA JavaScript libraries to find the one best suited for your tasks.
