20 Ways How to Reduce Bounce Rate

Is your website bounce rate too high? And do you want to reduce your bounce rate?

Many people believe that the bounce rate is one of the Google ranking factors. It shows Google about the quality of your site.

But having a high bounce rate, your ranking will be lower in search engines (SERPs). This means that users are not interested in your site. You have to change your strategy.

This article will guide you on how to reduce bounce rate and increase your conversions.

Before diving into ways to reduce bounce rate, I will explain what is bounce rate, what is a good bounce rate and how it’s calculated.

What Is Bounce Rate?

When a user visits on any page of your site and leaves without visiting other pages, this is a bounce.

Bounce rate is the percentage of users who visit on your website and exit on the same page without going to a second page.

What is a Good Bounce Rate

lower is better

But would you like to know what is a good bounce rate? Well, bounce rates vary by type of website or industry:

80%+ is very bad
70 – 80% is poor
50 – 70% is average
30 – 50% is excellent

A blog usually has a higher bounce rate. Reason, visitors scan content first and if they don’t find what they want, they exit.

How to Find Your Bounce Rate

You can check your website’s bounce rate by logging into the Google Analytics account. Here are some places in Google Analytics that you have to check.

Behavior >> All Pages >> Bounce Rate
Acquisition >> Channels >> Bounce Rate
Acquisition >> Source/Medium >> Bounce Rate
Acquisition >> AdWords >> Campaigns >> Bounce Rate

Now let’s get started…

How to Reduce Bounce Rate

It’s a great thing you’re working hard to increase your site search performance. But you should also pay attention to keeping your bounce rate lower.

High bounce rate, which shows that something is wrong in your strategy so that you are not able to attract visitors or visitors don’t have a good user experience on your site.

Listed below are 20 best ways to reduce bounce rate for your blog:

1. Improve Your Content’s Quality

One of the most reason for higher bounce rate – lack of quality content. If your content is not useful, visitors will leave your site immediately.

Always write unique and quality articles. Also, your articles should be interesting so that people read your blog full of joy.

Quick Tips for Writing Quality Content:

Content length – Your article should have at least 1000 words and should be well explained. Long content ranks well in search engines.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing – Makes your content unnatural and create bad user experience on readers. Keep keyword density 1.5% – 2% in your content. Also, use the related keyword with the main keyword in your content.
Write Catchy Title – After writing the article, optimize your title well. Because more than 50% to 60% of people first see the post title and then click on it. Always add your main keyword in the title.
Optimize Meta Description – This is a brief description of your blog post that appears below the title in search results. It increases click through rate (CTR) on your blog posts. Include the target keyword in it.
Write Shorter Paragraphs – Long and thick paragraphs scare readers to read them. Reader love to read short and clean paragraphs. So, always try to keep your paragraphs short. It improve your content readability . Also, use bold and italic for your important line. It attracts the visitor’s attention.

2. Boost Your Website Loading Speed

Faster loading gives a better user experience to visitors.

No one likes to visit slow loading websites. If your site loads slowly, the visitor will immediately leave your site. And as a result, this will increase your website bounce rate.

In addition, Speed is a Google ranking factor. So a faster loading site gets a good rank in Google search.

That’s why improve your site’s loading speed. Here are quick tips to improve website loading speed

Upgrade to PHP 7.2.
Optimize your image size.
Optimize your Database
Keep only useful plugins.
Delete unwanted media.
Minify CSS and JS Files.
Use the best cache plugin.
Minimize Redirects.
Use a lightweight theme.
Use CDN.
Use good web host.

3. Make Your Blog Clean and Simple

Keep your blog’s designs simple and clean. The colourful site distracts the reader attention. So, always select a clean, and responsive theme for your blog/website.

Also, make sure fonts aren’t too small. People will not adjust their focus. Just they will exit your blog (no matter how awesome it is). Use fonts that the visitor can easily scan.

I use 18px for my font size and it looks great on any screen size.

If you want to change the font size of your body, you can change it by going to style.css of the theme. Otherwise, just add the following code in the CSS section of the WordPress Customizer.

body {
font-size: 18px;
}

4. Add Related Posts to Your Site

If you want to keep the visitors on your site for a long time, then Related Posts can help to reduce bounce rate.

Suppose a user comes to your blog post, but it was not exactly what he was searching for or he wanted to read more, then you can try to keep them on your site with some other related content.

Related posts are often shown at the end of the content.

If you are a WordPress user, then there are many plugins available in the WordPress repository that can help you add related posts to your site.

5. Fix Broken Links on Your Site

Broken links greatly affect the user experience. Main goal of broken links is to reduce bounce rate and to give them the information they were looking for.

A broken link appears when you move or delete any page of your website and when visitors click on those URLs, they see a 404 error.

Fixing broken links are not a difficult task in WordPress. You can use plugins.

6. Check for Spelling and Grammar Errors

Spelling and Grammar errors reduce your credibility and reflect you unprofessional. It also tells visitors you don’t care enough about your content.

You can use the most popular extensions Grammarly check spelling error and Grammar error.

Furthermore, proofread before publishing your content. It improves your content quality. Matt Cutts is discussing on Grammar and Spelling in this video.

7. Open External Links in New Tabs/Windows

You link to another website – it’s great. This makes your content more useful and relevant. In addition, it helps to better understand search engines what content is.

Linking to high-quality external links can also be beneficial for SEO. But visitors will leave your site if you do not open links on new window or tab.

So always open external links in new tabs/windows. This strategy helps to reduce your website bounce rate to a great extent. Here is a guide – How to Open External Links in a New Window in WordPress

8. Internal Link

It does not only improve your website SEO and pageviews but it makes your content more useful for visitors and also help to reduce bounce rate. Linking one page to another on the same domain is called internal linking.

Just add some & relevant links to your content. Too much and irrelevant linking can actually adversely affect your bounce rate and SEO.

9. Check Cross-Browser Compatible

Check cross-browser compatible for your site. It is very important. Because your favorite browser is Chrome, it does not mean that your visitors are using the same.

If you open your site in Internet Explorer, your site will appear appears broken. Here are the tools you can use to check that your site looks great in all browsers.

10. Make Your Site Responsive

Is your site responsive? When visitors visit your site on their mobile devices, does it display perfectly?

If your site does not appear perfectly on mobile devices, then visitors will leave your site immediately. This will increase your bounce rate.

So make sure your site is mobile friendly. And for this, you can use Google’s Mobile Testing Tool. If your site is not mobile-friendly, then you need to install a responsive WordPress theme on your site.

11. Put Ads on Your Site Carefully

If you have ads running on your website try to place them on right location.

But many sites show lots of ads to make money that slow down your site and distract the reader’s attention. Especially popup ads. It greatly influences the bounce rate.

If you use pop-up ads on your site, it redirects visitors to other URLs when they visit your site. And such ads do not like visitors.

12. Use Proper Heading Tags

Heading tag helps you create a readable blog post. Suppose you have a blog post whose length is 5000-6000 words but have not used appropriate heading tags, then visitors will find it hard to read.

In addition, the H1 tag helps the search engine understand what your page is about, and little boost your ranking. But Never use the H1 tag more than once.

13. Use Images for Article

An image speaks a thousand words and keep visitors on your website longer. If your content is too long (4,000 words), use images in it so that visitors are not boring.

But one thing I would like to say, you can not use Google Images. They can be copyrighted and later can arise copyright problems.

There are many websites available in the market (FreeDigitalPhotos, MorgueFile, Pixabay, Pexels etc) which offer free stock images.

Make sure your image is high quality and looks great with your content layout. Also, do not forget to compress and resize before uploading your images.

14. Add Search Button on Your Site

If a visitor visits your site and does not find what he is looking for, then search button is the last thing that visitor will try before leaving your site.

By default, WordPress provides a search widget that you can place to your footer or sidebar. Apart from this, many themes provide inbuilt search buttons that you can show in your menu item.

15. Target the Right Visitors

When you get wrong visitors, obviously the bounce rate will be high. The reason they come to your webpage and leave without going to a second page or without reading the content.

Therefore, to reduce bounce rate for your site, it is very important to attract the right visitors. And in this, keyword optimization plays an important role.

For example, if you optimize your post for shoes, then use shoes related keywords. From this, visitors searching for shoes will be happy with your results. But, do not optimize for socks and shoelaces you also sell. This increases the bounce rate.

16. Use Black Text and White Background

Do not use vibrant colors for the text and background of your blog. Because it will hurt your bounce rate. However, it would look good to see but the readers would not like it.

When a visitor visits a blog, he likes a clean and simple blog. So, always use the black colour for your text and white colour for the background.

17. Use Videos To Engage Audience

Videos are powerful to reduce bounce rate.

They are highly engaging and attract more attention than text or image. You can make videos of your blog posts. This will greatly reduce your bounce rate.

18. Update Your Outdated Content

If you have old high-traffic posts, update it with fresh information and images. This will help keep your website bounce rate lower.

Update your old articles with new keywords and latest information and images. Then share them with your new reader and on Social Media Site.

19. Use Pop-ups Wisely

Pop-ups (opt-in forms or other) create bad user experience on visitors. But, there are lots of users who fill their site with popups which affects their bounce rate. Just because users do not like it at all and probably leave your site.

But opt-in form is very important to grow an email list. So use it cleverly on your site or blog. Also, set a timer for it so that it doesn’t hit the person immediately after they land on your website.

And even in the early days I also used a lot of popups on my site. As a result, the bounce rate of my site was greatly increased. But when I removed, the bounce rate dropped from 89% to 68%. Currently, I do not use any popups on my site. You can see.

20. Move Your Site to HTTPS

Chrome 68 and above versions are marking all non-HTTPS sites as “Not Secure”.

So this may also be a reason, visitors leave your site. That’s why HTTPS is very important!

If you are still using HTTP on your site, immediately move it to HTTPS. Here is a guide – How to Properly Move WordPress from HTTP to HTTPS

21. Create a “Table of Contents”

It captures your audience’s attention and shows quick information about your content.

There are many free plugins available in WordPress that you can use to implement this feature.

It makes your content quick scannable for readers what they are looking for.

Conclusion

In this article, I’ve shown you several ways to reduce your bounce rate. But without high-quality content, you can not reduce it.

If i have missed any strategies, let me know by comment.

Hope you found the post useful and comprehensive! Share your experience below.