Are you noticing a high bounce rate on your website?
Are you desperately looking for proven ways to reduce it on your WordPress sites? Then this detailed beginner’s guide is just for you. Bounce rate is one of the most underestimated metrics that affect the overall user experience of your site. It doesn’t matter how great your content is or how attractive your site design is, if your site has more visits to a single page, then conversion rates will suffer. and search rankings. So if you want to tackle the bounce problem on your site, this guide is for you, where you’ll learn everything from bounce rate reduction to effortless bounce rate reduction. You are ready? Let’s start.
Bounce rate: everything you need to know about it
What is a website bounce rate?
It represents the percentage of people who leave (i.e. leave) the same page without going to other pages on your site. It simply means when someone visits your site and leaves it without following any other link (or page). This is called a “bounce” on the site.
How to calculate the bounce rate? Here is the bounce rate formula, and how it is calculated:
Bounce Rate = (Single Page Visit / Total Visits) * 100
Let’s say your website or blog gets 1,000 hits a day and 700 of them were one-page hits (meaning people leave your site without clicking any other links or pages), in which case the rate would be 70%.
How to determine the bounce rate on your site in Google Analytics? Here’s how you can easily find it with Google Analytics. Google Analytics (latest version) itself shows you in the foreground, and if you want to take a closer look at it, you can click on “Audience Overview” and it will instantly show you all the data. Here’s what it looks like;
As you can see above, you can find a ton of metrics including;
- Number of users
- New Users
- Sessions
- Number of sessions per user
- Average session duration and so on
If you want to know the bounce rate for each individual page of your site, you should go to Google Analytics > Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
You can find the bounce rate on every single page on your site by going to the above location in Google Analytics, which is a great way to work on lowering bounce rates for your most popular posts. If you want to see the bounce rate for a different time period, you can also change the date range in the top right corner.
What is considered a good bounce rate on a website? According to Contentsquare, blogs have bounce rates of 70 to 90%, content sites have bounce rates of 40 to 60%, and service sites have bounce rates of 10 to 30%.
As you can see above, they vary from industry to industry depending on the type of blog you run. More importantly, Neil Patel also created an infographic that shows the average bounce rate by industry. Take a look.
As you can see above, this figure varies from 10% to 90%. Simple landing pages (with one call to action like “add to cart”) typically have the highest bounce rate of 90%, while portals like MSN, Yahoo groups, service sites, or Q& sites like Quora, have a low bounce rate of 10 to 30%. So where does your bounce from the above infographic land? The % bounce below gives an idea (overall).
- Over 90% is very bad
- 70 – 80% – bad
- 50-70% – average
- 30 – 50% – excellent
- 20% or below is most likely a tracking error (or you may have a brand new site)
That being said, a good bounce rate can be below 50-60% for most sites.
Bounce Rate vs Exit Rate: What’s the Difference?
Bounce rate and exit rate are two important metrics that are most often misunderstood by bloggers and SEOs. There is little difference between these figures. Here is how Google defines both of these terms.
- For all page views, the Exit Rate is the percentage that was last in the session.
- For all sessions that start on a page, the Bounce Rate is the percentage that was the only one of the sessions.
Simply put,
- Bounce rate is the percentage of single interaction sessions (i.e. visitors leave your site without going to another page).
- Exit Rate is the percentage of exits from the page (i.e. the number of people who leave your site after visiting the page and is compared to the total number of page views).
Exits can be more than a single-page visit, while bounces are always a single-page visit. Here is a great illustration of the ratio of failures and exits by CXL.
As you can see above, a high exit rate does not necessarily mean a high bounce rate (because your website visitors may have landed on the page from somewhere else on your site). In a nutshell, a site’s bounce rate only records “user exits” when users go directly to that page, while a site’s exit rate records all exits.
Benefits of Reducing Bounce Rates on WordPress Sites. Why should you be concerned about reducing bounce rates on your sites? Here are some of the biggest benefits of reducing bounce rates on your site.
- This can increase your website’s overall conversion.
- They will help you increase your stay time (which is also great for ranking up )
- Increases user engagement
- Increases your website’s overall sales (because people who spend more time on your site end up converting most of the time)
- And further down the list
Before diving into the details, you might want to first check if your site is experiencing any of the following issues.
- Slow page loading
- Bad site architecture
- No keyword strategy _
- Thin content on your site
- Mobile responsiveness issues
5 Ways to Improve Your WordPress Bounce Rate in 2023
Now let’s talk about some proven ways to reduce bounces on your site that work like a charm in 2023.
Create highly engaging and informative content
If you have a blog and your bounce rate is too high (over 90%), the first thing you need to analyze is how good the content is. Is your blog content readable? Is it useful for your target audience? Are you creating highly engaging content that keeps your audience on your blog? Or are you just creating mediocre content? If your content is mediocre, you need to fix your content marketing strategy and focus on creating ONLY in-depth articles that add value to your target audience. Here are some proven tips and techniques for creating highly engaging content that will help you greatly reduce bounce rates on your site.
Providing exclusive information. The only way to get online attention for your blog content is to provide exclusive information that no one else in your industry offers to your audience. What is the point of retelling other materials? You cannot stand out from the crowd by creating poor content. You have to create 10 times better content than your competitors if you want to grab the attention of your site’s audience. Only with the help of exclusive content can you make the audience stay on your blog for a long time (and they may look at other pages if they spend more time on your site).
Creating long-form content. Google has started to encourage long-form content as articles with 2000+ words gets higher rankings compared to short articles with 500 words. Deep articles will also help you improve your reading experience, as your readers will be able to get more information. Be sure to create “actionable content” as there is no point in creating 3,000-word articles that readers won’t be able to apply after reading. Your audience needs something to apply after reading your blog articles (or videos) – this is called actionable content and it always works like a charm.
Always spend more time writing great headlines. Whether you know it or not, 8 out of 10 people read your headlines first and then decide whether or not to click on other links on your site. You should always spend more time creating compelling headlines. You can come up with 3 to 5 headlines for each of your posts (so you can choose the best one), and use the headline analysis tools to analyze how strong your headlines are.
Speed up your site
One of the key determinants of your bounce rate is your website loading speed. If it takes a very long time to load (more than 3 seconds), visitors will immediately leave your site and go to other sites with faster loading times. It is so simple. Therefore, be sure to work on optimizing page load times. Here are some practical tips for improving your site’s page load times.
Upgrade to a Faster Hosting: The speed of your website mainly depends on the hosting you choose. We have been using WPX hosting at Bloggers Passion for over 3 years now and are very pleased with the results. Take a look at our website speed.
Install a caching plugin: If you are using WordPress and want to speed up your page loading time, you need to install a caching plugin as it generates static HTML pages of your site and saves them on the hosting server. This way, every time users visit your site, your caching plugin serves up a lighter HTML page instead of processing heavier WordPress PHP scripts, which ultimately results in faster page loads.
Optimize image sizes: On any site, images take up a lot of bandwidth (especially if you use too many images in blog posts or pages). Therefore, in order to speed up page loading, it is necessary to reduce the size of images.
Target the RIGHT keywords (with the right intent)
Do you have a keyword strategy? Not only will keyword research help you get more search traffic but using the right keywords with the right intent can help you reduce bounce rates and increase overall conversions on your site. Take a look at the following illustration to better understand the meaning of the keyword.
As you can see above, there are several types of keyword intent including;
- Informative keywords
- Navigation keywords
- Commercial keywords (also known as transactional or shopping keywords, which are used by people who are ready to make a purchase, for example, keywords: “buy now”, “discount”, “lightning deals”, etc.) The key to increasing user retention is − know what type of keywords you should use for each page (or post) you are going to publish on your site for the best results.
Make your website mobile responsive
Over 90% of people currently use their smartphones and tablets to browse the web, and about 79% of smartphone users have made an online purchase using their mobile device in the last 6 months. In the US, 94% of people with smartphones look up local information on their phones. In addition, according to Google, 77% of mobile searches occur at home or at work, places where desktops are most likely to be found.
This is why it is so important to have a mobile-friendly website and if your website is not mobile-responsive you will lose a lot of traffic, conversions, and sales to your competitors. If people are browsing your site on mobile phones and if your content or product pages don’t display properly, then they will leave your site immediately.
Use user-friendly internal links
Internal links are extremely important in reducing the number of bounces on your site’s pages, as they help your site’s readers find and navigate to other relevant pages on your site. If you’re writing a blog post without adding internal links, how can anyone find other content (especially the first visitors who read your blog posts)? If you publish posts without adding internal links, it can definitely harm your reading experience and also increase bounce rates.
Three step checklist
We have created the following EXCLUSIVE 3-step checklist for those looking to reduce bounce rates on their WordPress site. Here are two tools you will need;
- Google Analytics (free to use and set up)
- Tools like Crazy Egg (for heatmaps and A/B testing)
Select the page with the highest bounce rate on your site. Have you ever heard of the 80/20 Pareto rule? It says: 80% of your results depend on 20% of your efforts. If your site has higher bounce rates, then there are a few pages that contribute to the 80% bounce rate. Therefore, you need to find pages with a higher bounce rate. We recommend that you first find the top 10 blog posts or pages that send you the most traffic (use Google Analytics).
A Few Quick Tricks on How to Reduce Bounce Rates on Your WordPress Sites
Do you want to know how to reduce the bounce rate on websites? Here are some more simple yet effective tricks to reduce your bounce rate.
- Show related posts at the end. Showing related posts at the end of each blog post is one of the most effective ways to improve your site’s bounce rate. Take a look at our related posts on Bloggers Passion.
- Open external links in new tabs. One of the easiest ways to combat bounce rates on your blog pages is to open external links in new tabs.
- Stop showing excessive ads and limit pop-ups. Both Google and site users hate ads and pop-ups as they provide the worst user experience. They are annoying and also affect page loading times.
- Use excerpts from posts at the home/archive level. Not only do people visit your site from search engines like Google but there is also another source of traffic called “direct traffic” where people visit your site by typing your domain name into the address bar.
Conclusion
Reducing your website bounce rate should be your top priority if you’re not seeing an increase in search traffic. The key here is to focus on improving the overall quality of your blog posts and providing the best possible user experience while browsing your site.