Is your WordPress website having a high bounce rate?
You need to implement some of the efficient and actionable tips that can help you increase pageviews and reduce bounce rate of your WordPress website.
What is Bounce Rate?
The Bounce rate for a website is a percentage count measure of people visiting your website without going to any additional pages.
It is displayed as a percentage of single-page sessions on your website and is a good indicator of how relevant and engaging your website content is.
If you’ll be able to receive more site visitors to stick around for a longer time and simultaneously reading more of your content, and engaging in call-to-actions, then you will be more likely to attract lots of subscribers and convert more sales.
How to measure bounce rate?
You will require a Google Analytics account that can help you capture the statistics of the bounce rate and much more to reduce the bounce rate of your website. The average bounce rate for all websites hovers around 40.5% with content-driven websites.
For any website owner, the goal for the bounce rate is to aim for around 50% or lower.
How to reduce bounce rate?
Let’s take a look at some of the proven ways with which one can reduce the bounce rate on your WordPress website.
#1 Improve User Experience
If your site visitors have a difficult time navigating through your website, then you are guaranteed to have a high bounce rate. Luckily, I have some proven ways to improve user experience and reduce the risk of losing visitors to your website:
- Easy to read the content. Utilize white space, line height and font attribute to simplify the readability of the content. Using small paragraphs that are easy to skim. Pointing out important points using Lists and bullet points are always good ways to make your content look more organized and attract more visitors to continue reading.
- Easy navigation structure. Readers get frustrated if the navigation of the website is not proper and easy to navigate which can result in a higher bounce rate and loss of visitors. Have an obvious (and functioning) search bar, consider using a sticky navigation bar with clear menu items, and use sidebars to point visitors towards other content they may be interested in.
- Mobile-Friendly is a trend. In this smartphone age, more and more peoples are visiting your website via mobile devices than ever before, it is more crucial to have your website be 100% responsive. Minimize scrolling and resizing by using a responsive WordPress theme or plugin. Check out some of the internet facts and statistics of 2018 with an infographic that can help you understand the current trends. You can test your website’s design using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
#2 Improve Page Load Times
Nowadays, there is no excuse for a slow-loading website. Even your website gets penalized to poor SEO ranking if your website is loading slowly (i.e. more than 3 seconds).
Your visitors want your website to load in 2 seconds or less or they will leave your website immediately. To start, you can test your website’s loading time by using the online tools GTmetrix or Pingdom.
Also, you can use one of the best caching plugin’s like W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, or the premium plugin WP Rocket on your WordPress website to improve page load time. These plugins are designed to improve user experience as well as boost website page load speed.
Precaution: Before implementing such caching plugins make sure with your hosting provider whether they don’t have any in-built caching already implemented on your server.
If you have a healthy hosting budget for your business website and can spend a few extra bucks for better performance and reliability, then I would recommend you to upgrade your hosting provider to Kinsta or FlyWheel. Otherwise, you can go for SiteGround for the headstart of your WordPress website.
Outgrowing from your original hosting services is a good thing. That means you have a stream of traffic on your website which you have never seen before. However, this increase in traffic can slow your site down, if your server is not capable of handling it properly.
#3 Compress Images for optimized performance
Optimizing your images in WordPress can have a huge impact on your bounce rate. By reducing image file sizes before publishing them, you will be able to reduce the strain you placed on your server and help your pages load faster with optimized images.
You can compress your images before uploading them to your WordPress website using a useful and worthy tool called TinyPNG. Don’t let the name fool you though, you can compress your JPEG images as well. Even TinyPNG has a WordPress Plugin.
TinyPNG provides a service that strips your images of any useless information and reduces its file size. The end result is a smaller file and a faster loading time. Though some image quality will be lost due to its lossy compression technique, the difference often goes unnoticed. I prefer to optimize the image up to 20% only to avoid a noticeable loss of image quality.
You can also compress your images using a free WordPress plugin called WP Smush. Compressing your images using lossless compression techniques, this plugin will not sacrifice any of your image’s quality like TinyPNG, though the file sizes will remain a bit larger. Despite this, your images will still load much faster than uncompressed images.
You might be wondering how compressing images can help reduce the bounce rate of your website?
Everyone knows that a picture says a thousand words and if a picture loads fast then it will help readers engage with the article. Hence, it helps reduce the bounce rate of your website.
#4 Write Interesting and Well-Written Content
Most of the website visitors are looking for interesting and healthy content that is useful and beneficial for them. When people visit your webpage they are doing so because they are interested in something you are offering.
It is your responsibility to follow through and provide you, website readers, what they want whether that will be helpful tips, a special giveaway, or a must-have product.
Also, It is your job to make your content accessible in search results so that your intended audience can find you and visit your website to easily navigate through their particular interests.
- Using appropriate keywords. Use strong keywords in your post titles, headers and sub-headers, and images so that people searching those keywords will find your website. Make sure the keywords which are related to your content and are not used to simply attract more traffic.
- Be related to your targeted audience. If you are advertising a niche-specific product such as eco-friendly salon products make sure that is really what you are selling. If not, people are sure to leave once they realize your website is not what they were looking for.
- Have a clear Call to Action buttons. Getting your readers actively engaged in your content will encourage them to stick around and visit more web pages. Use pop quizzes and surveys, email subscription sign-ups with content upgrades, or coupons to use on a product you sell to encourage customers to explore your website further and thus reduce your bounce rate.
- Be mindful of SEO. Using a WordPress plugin such as Yoast SEO can get you ahead of the game when it comes to SEO best practices. You can designate a focus keyword, change permalinks to be more user-friendly, edit your search result excerpt, enable XML sitemap integration, and more by using this popular and free SEO plugin.
Conclusion
Understanding your website’s bounce rate is very beneficial for achieving a more healthy competition with your competitors and for driving a huge amount of organic traffic and converting them into paid customers.
Such beneficial techniques will help bloggers and website owners to reduce the bounce rate of their websites.
I hope you have enjoyed the proven ways to reduce the bounce of the WordPress website.