If you have a WordPress site and have gone live, congratulations. Most people hardly get started. So how do you keep the visitors coming to your brand new webpage and most importantly, how do you keep them interested? This query must be in your mind if you want to reduce the bounce rate of your website.

A bounce rate is a measure that gives Google an idea of your website’s quality. The higher your bounce rate is, the lower the chance of being found on search engines, and the opposite is true. Since you want to have people visit your site and take their time to go through various pages, then you have to reduce their chances of leaving midway.

Your website is only worth if you have visitors who take time to click through the content. This article will highlight how to reduce bounce rate and consequently increase the view time per visit.

What is Bounce Rate?

According to Google, “a bounce is a single-page session.”

A bounce rate is equivalent to the number of visitors who access your site and immediately leave without requesting to load more pages. Every visit that lasts no more than a few seconds counts as a “bounce.” A bounce rate is, therefore, one single session divided by all sessions.

Essentially, a bounce rate that is higher than 60% is the beginning of your WordPress site downward spiral. It means either you don’t have good quality content to keep the visitors interested or you have one landing page and nowhere else to go.

According to research, most landing pages and blogs have the highest percentage of bounce rate, followed by e-commerce sites and lead generation pages. You don’t have to fall in the common pit as well since there are many things you can carry out to improve your site’s bounce rate.

If you use Google Analytics, you can tweak it to consider a session as “bounce” if the visitor ends the session after a certain length of time. On the other hand, if a session lasts for several minutes, the session should cease being a bounce.

How to Find Your Bounce Rate?

Finding information on your website’s performance, especially the bounce rate, is a valuable skill. You need to know which pages seem to contribute to a high bounce rate and which traffic seems to bounce more.

Knowing this helps you to look into the content critically for quality improvement and the site’s design as a whole. Below are several places you can check for bounce rate on your website.

To Check Page’s Bounce Rate

Your website may have several pages where some are doing better than others. Most landing pages have the highest number of bounce rate as compared to other pages with engaging content. To check which of the pages may cause your WordPress site’s bounce rate to skyrocket, go to the Behavior and click on “All Pages.”

You’ll view an analysis of your entire pages bounce rate, and you can determine which content needs a slight tweaking or deleting to improve.

Traffic Bounce Rate:

The most engaged and highly converting traffic is usually from organic searches through the various search engines (SERPs). If you have other means of traffic generation such as paid advertisements or social media links, you need to ensure they’re not contributing to high visit abandonment on your site.

Having the right traffic helps to reduce the bounce rate because they’d be more interested in what you’re offering thus take their time going through the site. To check which traffic is more profitable and best to invest in, click on channels tab under the acquisitions.

Referral Traffic with Lowest Bounce Rate:

Sometimes you can’t help it; you want as many referrals as possible to lead back to your site. Having more people click away also translates to the amount of money you’ll earn from Ads. It’s therefore essential to keep a close eye on the source of referral traffic, so it doesn’t end sabotaging what you want to build.

The lower the bounce rate from a particular referral, the better it will work for your site. It’s best to resolve the issues that could end up causing people to leave immediately after landing on your website. However, if you notice the pattern is coming from particular referral traffic, you can get rid of the referral and boost the ones that stay longer.

To find out the referral traffic with the lowest bounce rate, click on the Acquisition tab, All Traffic and then proceed to the Source/Medium window.

AdWords Campaign:

Your Adword campaign is only useful if it leads quality traffic to your site. People who want to linger on your page and scroll to additional pages are every site owner’s dream audience. You can quickly identify which Adword campaign is working good for you by selecting the AdWords tab under Acquisition and proceed to the campaign tab.

You can stop the campaigns that seem to have the highest bounce rate and proceed with the rest.

If you have checked all the above and feel ready to make your performance slightly better than it is, there are several ways of doing so. Lowering your bounce rate is not complicated. However, it will require your input, especially in creating quality content that is worth the time.

10 Effective Ways to Reduce the Bounce Rate on WordPress Site

1. Splitting Up Long Posts

If your WordPress site has long posts, you can divide them into several pages. This trick works for many famous sites such as Forbes and NY Times. Since the customers will have to keep moving from one page to the next, you need to make the content relevant and worth perusing to avoid increasing the bounce rate.

2. Avoid Pop-Ups and Splash Pages

Most people swear by pop-ups to increase the number of subscribers and long-term loyal customers. However, an equally higher number of people find pop-ups annoying and unnecessary. The same applies to splash pages which require several clicks and validation from the visitors to access the site.

Before you completely rid your site off the two, use the statistics to show how they’re affecting the bounce rate. Keep the two features only if they’re not negatively affecting the bouncing rate by adding value to the viewer.

3. Improve Your Navigation

Your website navigation affects the user’s experience, which determines if the customer stays or leaves. The navigation is how your visitors move around your site after finding what they’re looking for on the menu buttons.

Too many buttons end up confusing the visitors, and too little guidelines can lead to frustration. When choosing your WordPress site, have the customer in mind and that will guide you to display what is critical and valuable to them. Your site’s purpose also helps to determine what to bring to the fore when the viewer is accessing the site.

4. Add Related Posts To Your Site

If you have several visitors on your site, especially on specific topics, it’s likely they’ll be looking for more on the same or related issues. Don’t assume that the visitors will search it themselves. The internet is a distracting place, and they may not think of looking through your site for related posts. Make the decisions easy on the visitor by letting them know what action they need to take next. At the bottom of each post, show similar or related posts that they can read.

The procedure works all the time, and it helps to reduce the bounce rate significantly.

5. Customize 404 Error Page

Your Error 404 site shows the kind of pages that have not yet been created on your website. Most viewers leave the site after encountering an error 404 page. It would, therefore, be of much help if you personalize the page by showing the visitors what they need to do after encountering such a problem. You can drop the, “contact us” link so they can get to you on the matter.

When viewers are already looking for something on your site, regardless of the error they encounter, they’ll take up your immediate suggestion if they know you’re highly likely to provide what they need or are searching for.

6. Increase In-Content Links

When you have a dedicated WordPress site with a specific niche that you’re highly competent in, you become a wealth of knowledge to those who are looking for your kind of expertise.

Sharing links on inter-related content gives your viewers more information on one website.

Adding links that lead back to other posts within your website helps the viewers find what they need with ease and in return, lowers their chances of leaving to other sites. Although in-content links are beneficial, take care not to fill your fills with too many links as this may end up hurting your ranking with search engines. Only use links where necessary and if it leads back to the relevant content of the current post.

7. Utilize the White Space

Less is more in web design, and that’s why WordPress themes aren’t as busy as they used to be. A crowded website is confusing to any reader and can hurt your bounce rate for the worse. Utilizing a white space means that you have a white background on your website, which holds nothing.

The user can rest their eyes on that space when going through your website. It also helps the main idea of the website to pop so that the user is aware of where to begin the navigation and what to find. Companies such as Google have had success with the utilization of white space, especially from the Google Search page.

8. Test Your Site on Mobile

If your site is not mobile friendly, there will be a high percentage of bounce rate. Most people do their searches using mobile phones than from any other device. Therefore, creating a mobile-friendly WordPress site helps the more significant percentage of web surfers to access your site with ease.

In addition, a mobile-friendly site helps to boost your ranking with search engines since it’s among the criteria of determining the websites that qualify the first pages. Since the majority of people use mobile phones, you’d be risking your website if it’s not mobile-friendly. The high number of bounce rate may end up lowering your website’s quality in return hurt your online presence.

9. Have an Interactive Side-Bar

One of the most poorly utilized components in a WordPress site is a side-bar. That is the area on the side that shows the visitor where they can go next after finishing with the current post.

You can show the most viewed posts in the month or the most popular posts that may relate to the current information. Utilizing that part of the website gives the user more options after they’re down with the first quest, which consequently lowers the bounce rate.

10. Improve Your SEO

SEO helps draw the right traffic to your website. The right people will not leave your site if you have what they’re looking for. SEO also goes a long way in helping you refine quality content on your website.

You’ll need to make an initial investment by hiring a company to carry out the SEO research for you, or you can invest your time and carry out the research yourself. The results are worth the time and money put in because you’ll experience a lower number of bouncing visits.

SEO keywords also improve the users’ experience because they don’t need to toil to get the results they’re looking for. An SEO optimized site is, therefore, a necessity in improving the bounce rate.

Related Read: 10 SEO Strategies That No Longer Work In 2019

Conclusion

Bounce rate is an important aspect that determines the website’s success. It’s, however, like any other website success metric, dependent on quality content, site performance, website design, lead generation techniques, among many other aspects. Therefore, to succeed in reducing the bounce rate, you need to look into more other areas such as the ones mentioned above. After all, your visitors are your customers, and when they don’t linger in what you’ve designed for them, then you may need to change it.