10 May 2022
13 Quick Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate in WordPress
Do you want to reduce the bounce rate in WordPress?
Users who stay on your site longer are more likely to join your email list, leave a comment, make a purchase, follow you on social media, and more.
In this post, we’ll cover the 13 quick ways to keep your visitors engaged and reduce the bounce rate of your WordPress site.
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that bounce (i.e., exit) from the same page without navigating any other pages on your website.
It simply means when someone visits your website and abandons your site without clicking on any other link (or page). That’s called “bouncing” on a website.
A visitor might leave your website in several ways.
- Clicking the back button.
- Typing in a new URL.
- Closing the tab or window.
- The session times out (from hosting errors).
How to Calculate Bounce Rate?
Here’s the formula for calculating bounce rate:
Bounce Rate = (Single Page Visit/ Total Number of Visits) * 100.
Let’s assume that your website or blog gets 1000 visits per day, and 500 of them are single-page visits (which means people are exiting your site without clicking on any other links or pages). In this case, then it will be 50%.
What is a Good Bounce Rate?
Good bounce rates will depend on your industry and the type of website you have.
You can keep in mind some general rules when looking at your own data.
- Over 80% is very bad.
- Between 70 and 80% is poor.
- Around 50 to 70% is good.
- Between 30 to 50% is great.
- Under 20% is generally a tracking error.
What Are the Reasons for High Bounce Rate?
Here are a few reasons that may be responsible for a high bounce rate on your website:
- Poor User Experience: When visitors can’t find easily what they need, they leave, increasing the bounce rate.
- Bad Website Design: If your users don’t find your website engaging and useful, they’ll leave, increasing your bounce rate.
- Slow Loading Speed: When it comes to site loading speed, every second counts. Even a 100-millisecond delay in loading time can reduce conversion rates by 7%.
- Bad and Outdated Content: Having outdated information on your website also increases your site’s bounce rate.
- Technical Errors: Broken internal links, shrunken images, and poor typography can result in a high bounce rate.
- Non-responsive Website: With most people using mobile devices to access the internet, having a responsive website is important. If your site does not adapt properly to all screen sizes, you will see high bounce rates.
How to Check Your Existing Bounce Rate?
To check our bounce rate, we suggest you can use Google Analytics with the MonsterInsights plugin. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress used by over 3 million websites.
This lets you easily view your traffic and user data directly from your WordPress dashboard.
For more, check our guide on how to add Google Analytics to WordPress.
13 Quick Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate on Your WordPress Site
Listed below are 13 quick ways to reduce bounce rate and boost user engagement on your WordPress site.
1. Improve Your Site Speed to Reduce Bounce Rate
One of the key factors determining your bounce rate is how fast your website is. If it takes more than 3 seconds to load, your visitors immediately leave your site and increase the bounce rate.
Your website needs to load quickly if you want to reduce your bounce rate.
Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix can help you in determining the exact load time of your website pages. You may also look at the Core Web Vitals section in Google Search Console. There, you can check which web pages take longer to load and how to speed them up.
Page speed affects your search engine rankings as well. Google has started to rank pages based on page speed and user experience. A faster page speed boosts your SEO by providing a better user experience, and a better user experience usually leads to higher rankings in the SERPs.
To help you improve your website’s speed, we have created a detailed post on how to improve WordPress speed and performance.
2. Optimize Your Internal Linking Structure
Internal linking your content is not only important to SEO, but it’s also one of the best ways to reduce bounce rate and boost page views.
Internal linking is the process of connecting pages on your website.
For example, we can link to our best WordPress newsletter plugin here in this sentence as our internal link.
Internal links are links that are related to your existing content.
You can easily add internal links directly from your WordPress content editor.
3. Make Your Content Readable
If you run a blog and your bounce rate is too high, the first thing you should look at is the quality of your content. Is the content of your blog readable? Is it helpful to your targeted audience?
Are you creating high-quality content that keeps your readers returning to your blog? Or are you just creating thin content?
If your content is poor, you should rethink your content marketing strategy and focus only on creating in-depth articles that provide value to your target audience.
Some simple ways to improve readability include:
- Use subheadings to break up your content.
- Keep your paragraphs short.
- Use bullets and lists when possible.
- Embed videos and add images to your content.
- Write in a friendly tone.
4. Reduce Popups to Decrease Bounce Rate
Popups are an effective way to grow your email list. However, if not used correctly, they might hurt the user experience.
You’ve likely been to a website where you were lots of popups. When all you were trying to do was read the content.
Instead of providing a poor user experience, you may create popups that appear as users leave your site.
You may either let them go or try to turn them into a subscriber.
The simple way to do this is using OptinMonster. It’s the best lead generation plugin, used by over 1 million websites.
You can use the Exit-Intent® technology to show popups when visitors are thinking about leaving your site. There are also advanced targeting features, so you can create and show popups that are highly relevant to your visitors.
5. Make Your Website Mobile Responsive
Over 50% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re giving many users a bad experience.
If your bounce rate is very high and you haven’t optimized for mobile, this might be why.
The best way to determine if your site is mobile-friendly is to use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Simply enter your URL, and you’ll get a report on how to optimize your website.
The easiest solution to ensure your site is mobile-friendly is to choose a responsive WordPress theme. A responsive WordPress theme adjusts itself to the screen size of your visitors.
As a result, your WordPress site will look great on mobile, tablets, and desktops.
6. Add Search Functionality to Your Website
If your website bounce rate is high, it’s possible that visitors can’t find what they’re looking for.
Adding strong search functionality to your website can fix this problem. In addition to search, you should provide simple faceted navigation, especially for eCommerce sites where information architecture is critical to the UX.
Check our list of the best WordPress search plugins to improve your site search.
7. Improve Your Navigation Menus
Your navigation menu is one of the main ways visitors will navigate around your site. Most website owners don’t give much thought to their navigation menus.
However, a navigation menu that is too complicated or confusing will increase bounce rates.
You want your navigation menu to be easy and help your visitors find exactly what they’re looking for.
8. Open External Links in a New Tab
Linking to other websites is another good practice. It helps you create relations with other website owners and increases the value of your content.
On the other hand, external links might cause users to leave your site, increasing your bounce rate.
The best way to solve this is to have your external links open in a new tab or window. As a result, if a visitor clicks an external link, they will not leave your website.
WordPress allows you to open external links in a new tab within your post editor.
9. Include a Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)
When trying to reduce bounce rate, avoid doing anything that may mislead your visitors. This includes making your call-to-action (CTA) too complex.
For example, you should avoid using several CTAs on your landing pages. Choose one clear action that you want visitors to do. Make it simple.
You should also think about where you’re going to put your CTA.
The vast majority of your visitors will determine whether or not they like your site within seconds of landing, which means they will only look at the top portion of the page.
Consider placing your CTA here so that users know your page’s goal right away.
10. Run A/B Tests
A/B testing allows you to test two or more versions of a website or post to discover which one performs best.
A/B testing regularly can help you uncover little (or big) changes to your website that can reduce your bounce rate. You may have high bounce rates because of anything as minor as the color of your CTA button. It might, however, be a major problem, such as how your landing page directs visitors through your sales funnel.
11. Match Content to Search Intent
Another simple way to lower bounce rates is to verify that your content fits the search intent for each keyword you target.
For example, when users search for broad, top-of-funnel keywords, they are looking for broad, informational pieces of content. They don’t expect to see a homepage or product page when they click through the search results. Shocking them with something is a sure-fire way to get them to click the back button.
So, while creating content, consider beyond keywords. Understand your users’ objectives and provide answers to their questions. You may reduce bounce rates even further if you guess their next question and link to relevant content.
12. Add Images and Graphics
Images and graphics are a good way to grab attention and capture visitors’ interest.
In other words, you can make your content more engaging by including images and graphics. As a rule, users are attracted to content that includes images, graphics, and other visual elements.
In many cases, images can merely serve to make the content look more appealing and aesthetic, whereas in some cases, they can help the users by demonstrating a step or process or by showing some statistics and data in the form of a chart or table.
If you can make your content more appealing by including images, you’ll be able to keep users on your website for longer, which will reduce your bounce rate.
13. Keep Updating Old Content
The blog posts published on a website are one of the key factors affecting its bounce rate. A blog with useful and valuable information will attract and keep the attention of its readers.
When visitors are attracted to a certain blog post, they will stay on the website to read it. They might also visit other pages linked to anchor texts in the content. This will decrease the bounce rate since visitors will not leave the site after only seeing a single page.
However, for your content to be effective in lowering bounce rates and improving conversions, you must be consistent.
You must go to an old post and update them with newer information. Similarly, you should continuously upload new and interesting information regularly.
Final Thoughts to Reduce Bounce Rate in WordPress
The bounce rate is an essential factor in deciding the success of a website.
It is, however, like any other website success metric, dependent on quality content, site performance, website design, and lead generating strategies, among many other factors.
As a result, if you want to reduce the bounce rate, you should look at other areas like the ones described above. After all, your visitors are your customers, and if they don’t stay long in what you’ve created for them, you may need to make some changes.
We hope this post helped you to reduce the bounce rate in WordPress. For your next steps, you’ll find these resources helpful:
