How to Lower Bounce Rate of Your WordPress Website

More than the actual number of visitors on your website, you should also be concerned about whether or not they are staying and browsing through your content.

There is no use getting tens of thousands of visitors per day if your average bounce rate is at 95%.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate refers to the measure of your customers’ behavior as they “bounce” away from your site within a 5-second time frame — whether they close their browser window or tab or immediately change the website URL upon getting to your site.

A high bounce rate gives the impression that your visitors are not interested in the content of your website — that’s why they move on.

For any business website, e-commerce store, and brand web page, a high bounce rate is never ideal as it doesn’t establish a good connection with your potential customers and clients.

They may notice you on search results or get interested enough to click your link from referral websites, but as soon as they get to your website, the story changes. For some reason, they go away quickly and may not come back again ever.

What Causes a High Bounce Rate?

There are a few factors why your potential customers bounce away from your site. Some of the main reasons are:

• Your homepage (or other pages) takes too long to load. An acceptable load time is 2 seconds or less — anything more than this will ward off your visitors.
• Your website is not aesthetically appealing, i.e. font sizes are too small or too big, colors don’t complement one another, texts are not readable, etc.
• Your content is not enough to answer the users’ queries, or there isn’t any value-added information available on the page.
• You’re using misleading titles and meta descriptions — what they see on the search results pages is different from what’s inside your webpage.
• Your visitors open a blank page or error page from your website.
• Your website contains inappropriate content.

An inaccurate Google Analytics setup may also cause incorrect tracking of bounce rate and other data.

However, with how easy Google Analytics setup is, it is almost impossible that you may install it mistakenly. When you have a high bounce rate, there is a high chance that your website is not favored by your target audience, so you have to do something about it.

Ways How to Lower the Bounce Rate of Your Website

No matter what niche you are in or what type of website you are running, you should always aim for a low bounce rate.

A bounce rate of 25 to 40% means you have excellent content and your visitors are fond of what your website offers.

50 to 60% is acceptable, but anything higher than this should be improved.

Here are some proven ways how you can lower the bounce rate of your WordPress website.

1. Create interesting and valuable content for your target audience. Always think about something unique, something not yet available in any other place. If you offer information or insights that answer your users’ common questions, they will stay on your website for a longer period and even go back for more.
2. Establish an excellent user experience on your website. Make sure not to put so many ads that pop out, distracting videos, or spammy content that would annoy your visitors and push them out of your site. Fix broken and dead links, too, and minimize any error page.
3. Choose a web design that matches your brand, and make sure that it is visually appealing. Carefully select font styles and sizes, background colors, background images, highlights, link colors, and other details that may seem trivial, but make an impact on how other users view your website. It would help to get a third-party perspective to see details that you may miss out on.
4. Strive to create brand storytelling. What is your website about? Who is it for? What message are you trying to express? Include case studies, reviews, and personal experiences that will help other users understand what your brand is and how it benefits individuals, communities, and corporations. It is important that your target audience is able to relate to what you are trying to convey.
5. To lower the bounce rate, you also have to make your customers go back to your website every now and then. To do this, you need to create new and fresh content regularly. Whether it’s in the form of a blog, video, or infographics, publishing regular content will keep them coming back and expecting more from you.
6. Improve your website’s speed. Strive to achieve a one-second loading time for your web pages or faster, if possible. In order to do this, you need to use only the right size and amount of images and videos, improve server response time, optimize your codes, and optimize your images.
7. Ensure that your website is responsive and can adjust to different screens. Just imagine if you are a user on a mobile device and you open a website that doesn’t really fit on your screen, with images overlapping the texts and different colors all over the place, would you still bother to browse through that website?

To improve the overall performance of your website and increase the quality of your visitors — which you would eventually convert into buying customers —, make sure that you look at your bounce rate closely and lower it according to the tips we mentioned above.