Today, in this article you are going to learn how to reduce bounce rates on your WordPress website.
What is Bounce Rate?
There is no better definition of a bounce rate than Google’s definition especially since most of users will use Google Analytics to track our website activity.
“A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.
Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.” Google
Bounce rate (%) =Number of visits that access only a single page ÷ Total number of visits to the website X 100 – Wikipedia
Why is Bounce Rate Important to You?
Bounce rates should be of interest to any website owner because it is a measure of relevance of your website to a website visitor.
For three particular reasons:
- As a measure of content relevance, bounce rate shows how your audience interacts with your content.
When the content on your website does not resonate with your audience, then the chance is high that they will click away within the first few seconds of entering your website.
- Secondly, bounce rates are a very good gauge of your traffic sources and or the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
High bounce rate can easily be an indication that your ads are not relevant to the content on your website.
Could it be that the keywords people are using to find your website are mismatched with the content on your website?
- Bounce rate is an important metric search engines use to ranks websites on their SERPs.
This is tied to both the above factors.
When visitors click away or spend less time on your website, search engines will ideally think that your content is not relevant to visitors.
They will, therefore, punish your website by showing your website less often and lower on their results.
Now that you know why you should pay attention to bounce rates let us consider how to reduce them.
How to Reduce Bounce Rates?
1. Create high quality and relevant content for your audience
People click away from your website or landing page if they feel that the content you have is not relevant or related to their needs.
To get around this;
- First, understand who your target customer is. Find out what ticks and what would make the want to stick around longer and explore the other pages on your website.
- Secondly, with the knowledge of your audience personal, create content – it could be blog posts, videos, infographics, or anything that speaks the language of your audience.
As a matter of fact, websites that mix up the types of content they have on their website tend to have lower bounced rates.
You should, therefore, consider adding image and videos to your content.
2. Halt traffic from sources that send you untargeted visitors
When you dig into your analytics data, understand the sources of traffic to your website that bounce a lot.
I often click on ads promoting to one thing but, you land on a general page or one that has nothing to do with the original ad.
It would be very hard not to have a high bounce rate in such cases.
In this case, you will need to look at your marketing campaigns, and either end them or create relevant landing pages for them.
3. Improve the user experience of your website
Could it be that website visitors do not love or struggle to use your website?
Build websites that are aesthetically appealing and make it easy for visitors to navigate around and find content.
With A/B testing of different layout designs, you can adopt a design that is tested to have low bounced rates.
The benchmarks for great user experience is a website whose content is readable.
- Look at the size of fonts used, the font color and font type.
- Utilize larger headlines and subheadings
- Properly use colors that contrast the different content sections and add life to your website.
- Have enough whitespace (space between texts and paragraphs) that gives your text some kind of breathing space allowing it to stand out.
- Use bullets and numbering of your text to make it readable and look categoried.
4. In line with that, work to improve on the page speed of your website
Visitors don’t tend to hang around waiting for pages to load.
They will click away within the first 5 seconds if the page is not loading fast enough for them.
With tools look Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix every website admin should be able to investigate the potential culprits slowing down their websites.
5. Implement easily accessible CTAs(Call to Action ) on your website
What is the ultimate aim of having people visit your website?
Is it signup to a mailing list? Make a purchase? Or click and enter another page where your objectives are completed?
Whatever it is, your CTAs should be related to the what brought the visitors to your website in the first place, and secondly, they should be placed in areas that a new visitor should easily see on entry.
Conclusion
In conclusion, even to seasoned marketers, it is often hard to zero down on what could be the actual cause of higher bounce rates.
That is is why they invest heavily in analytics and tools that help them perform some tests – like A/B split testing – to test which ad campaigns work well, what version of a landing page or website keeps visitors longer on the site, what CTA works and which ones do not work.
Building a successful brand online is not about guesswork; it involves time and effort.
Ultimately, to keep users longer on a website, create content that resonates with them.
Websites that have longer and quality valuable content have always performed better than their counterparts.
You may also want to see our picks for the best free related posts plugins to keep visitors longer on the site.