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How to reduce the bounce rate on websites: 15+ tricks that work

Does your website’s bounce rate increase every day and losing your conversions? Do you want to reduce the bounce rate of your website?

Reduce bounce rates on Websites

The bounce rate of the website shows the user experience of the site. If you have a lower bounce rate, then it shows the great user experience of the website

High bounce rates are a major problem for getting less conversion. If you want to improve your conversion, then take extra care to reduce the bounce rate of the website.

The visitors are just coming and returning from your website, without taking any action or moving to another page, then you have less chance for converting your visitors.

You need to keep your visitors within your content as long as to create brand awareness and better conversions. Writing SEO-optimized and lengthy blog posts is not enough for better conversions.

Most marketers accept that lower bounce rates are also a ranking factor in search engines. If people don’t like your content then search engines don’t rank your content. It’s because search engines love websites, where people spend more time with lower bounce rates.

If you are worried to reduce your website bounce rate, then don’t worry. Read below.

What is the Bounce Rate?

If the user visits your website and decides to leave your website without visiting the second page is called a bounce. The percentage of visitors coming to your website and leaving your site without moving to the second page or taking any action is called bounce rate.

If you are not able to convince and take people to the second page or take any action, then it leads to a higher bounce rate. Search engine signals take bounce rates as one of their important factors for a better user experience of the site.

What does Google say about the Bounce Rate?

Look out what Google explains about the Bounce rate.

Google states bounce as a single-page session. If only a single request is triggered to the analytics, then it is considered as the bounce. Bounce rate is a single-page session divided by all sessions.

Bounce rate explained by Google

“If you are having a single page site or other types of content, in which single sessions are expected, then a high bounce rate is perfectly normal”.

It is mentioned as the bounce rate in Google analytics.

You can use Google Analytics to find your bounce rates with different metrics and filters.

Bounce rate on Google Analytics

Google analytics gives you complete analytics about your average session duration and bounce rates.

You can look out at the landing pages in the behavior option to find the details of your bounce rate on your Google analytics. 

Bounce rate for each landing page on Google analytics

This option helps you to find the bounce rate for individual landing pages. It gives you the bounce rates for each landing page. If any particular landing pages are having a higher bounce rate, then you can optimize it,

But if you are having a bounce rate overall throughout your website then it is a major thing to consider. So you have to reduce the bounce rate on the blog and website.

What is a Good Bounce rate to maintain?

Generally, there is now a perfect bounce rate for everyone. The bounce rate changes depending on the different types of websites and niches you are working on.

Some niches will have bounce rates less than 40% and others may have above 85%. It all depends on the field and category you are focusing on.

But in common, having a lower bounce rate is better in every industry. 

Here HubSpot gives some realistic expectations with benchmark averages for bounce rates. It gives average bounce rates for different types of websites.

Average benchmark for bounce rates on different websites

This is the average bounce rate for different landing pages and unique websites.

Then also you are asking how to fix my bounce rate and improve conversions? Follow the below methods to reduce your bounce rate on any website and better conversions.

15+ Ideas to reduce bounce rate on a website

1. Speed Optimization

When it comes to user experience and conversion optimization, websites speed is the first thing to consider. The better loading speed of your website gives quick access to your visitors.

According to Google, increasing every second in site loading time, significantly higher your bounce rate. If the page loading time goes from 1 second to ten seconds, then mobile visitors bounce increases to 123%.

Page load time affects bounce rates

It shows how significantly the page loading speed effects and increases your bounce rate. So speed optimization is the first thing you to focus on.

You can use speed optimization plugins like Perfmatters to highly improve your site’s performance. This Perfmatter plugin reduces your HTTP requests, codes and optimizes your database for better speeds. 

For caching purposes, you can use free plugins like WP super cache and W3 total cache.

Premium WordPress hosting providers comes with multi-level built-in caching technology. It highly speeds up your website from the server-side. 

Every website also must use the Content delivery network (CDN), for the fast delivery of the web pages at any corner of the world.

The managed hosting like WPX has its own custom-built CDN network, which provides better speeds to your websites.

When it comes to site architecture, SEO-friendly themes are optimized for better page loading speeds.

You can use speed testing tools like Google page speed or GT Metrix to find your website’s page loading speed. 

GT metrix - Page speed testing tool

Use Image optimization techniques to speed up your site and reduce the page size. Larger size pages take more time. The Shortpixel plugin will help you to automatically compress your images.

2. Provide Quick navigation

Easy navigation helps visitors to access every part of the website. Clear navigation directs the users, where to go next.

The header and footer are the best places to have proper navigation. If you have blogs, that belong to different categories then place all the categories in the header for quick navigation.

Plan your navigations better and place all the important links from your websites. You can also place links to important pages of your blog

Homepage, about page, and contact page are some of the frequently visited pages on all websites. 

If people like your content, then it makes them know about you. So people will try to navigate to the about page or home page. So having the about page links either in the header or footer will also make it better.

Having quick and easy navigation for every part of your website will also help search engine crawlers to index your pages faster.

3. Have a better design

To design a better website, you don’t need any programming or coding skills. Choose premium WordPress themes like Astra or DIVI themes to have a great website design.

Most times using simple and clean SEO-friendly themes are much better. You don’t need high-end graphics on your website to show it as great.

People are not coming to your website for looking at designs, but for content. So choose content-focused designs, that don’t distract your readers more.

Make your website more responsive for the users. 

Minimalistic themes are lightweight and load faster. Provide a great user experience to your website with a simple design.

Usually, people don’t like to spend more time on websites, so give your content quickly and make them take the desired action.

4. Have Better readability

Many beginners to show their creativity, use some different and unique themes. It makes the users difficult to read. 

You should have an easily readable font and the content should be formatted. Choosing one of the popular Google fonts can give much better content readability.

Once people enter your blog, they should need to flow through the content without any difficulties.

Have smaller paragraphs, some list points, add subheadings, and grammar error-free. Use the best blogging tools like Grammarly to improve your writing skills.

Having a combination of organized text and writing different types of blogs, gives many visitor attractions. Without proper formatting, most times informative lengthy blog posts also don’t get attractive.

5. Use different media and visuals

Try out different types of media and visuals on your blog content. Using different types of images at regular intervals gives much attention to the readers.

With the psychology of visual attraction, using different types of visuals is more important. Using visuals like Infographics gets more attraction from the readers. 

You will also get free images from many websites without royalty to use in your blogs. 

Use graphics designing tools like Stencil, Snappa, and Canva to create better visuals. Image optimization is also an important thing to be considered.

Keeping the best practices of using images in blog posts improves visitor attention.

Include a site search bar on your websites. You can place the site search functionality on your header, footer, or sidebar. 

It is also one of the easy ways of navigation and reduces a website’s bounce rate. The visitors can also easily search for the relevant topic posts from the search bar.

7. Manage and limit your popups

Don’t show your popups to distract the visitors. Initially let the visitors explore the content, what they came for.

The pop-up plugins like Thrive leads, Bloom, and Hello Bar come with better targeting options. You can show the pop-ups after 30 seconds or after scrolling to half your pages.

Using these types of things allows us to explore the visitors on the content first. 

Sometimes new bloggers, providing complete page pop-ups instantly when a visitor enters your page. It causes the visitor to leave your site. 

You can also use exit intent technology to show pop-ups when a user leaves your page. Hello Bar provides different pop-ups and sliders and that gives better engagement to the users. It also helps to direct your visitors to particular landing pages of the website.

The best email marketing software like GetResponse comes with different popups and signup forms for better conversions.

If you are using any push notifications tools like PushEngage, then make sure it triggers after some specified time.

8. Better Internal Linking 

Internal linking is one of the main factors that affect bounce rates. Having a better internal linking will highly help you to reduce the bounce rate of your website.

Link out to the relevant pages on your blog post. Focusing on the correct anchor text will also improve your SEO. Internal Linking is one of the underutilized SEO strategies. 

So linking to your relevant blog pages helps in improving page views and lower your bounce rates.

9. Blog consistently

Consistently writing more blogs helps you reduce bounce. If you have more blogs, then you can do better internal linking and more content to explore.

Create a cluster of blog posts around the same category. Initially focus on a very limited number of categories. Have a minimum of 5 to 10 blog posts in every category. It’s because, if anyone likes your blog post, then they will explore more about that topic. 

So create some pillar content and some blog posts to assist it.

When it comes to linking, we use both internal and outbound links on our blog posts.

Using the outbound links to relevant articles will help your visitors to gain more knowledge. But clicking a link to a new website will lower your visitor duration. So make your links open in the new tab. 

Most importantly make all your outbound links open in a new tab. So simultaneously two pages are opened and increase your page duration.

11. Optimize Widgets, banners, and SideBar

Having blank widgets and a sidebar doesn’t help you to reduce bounce rates. You can use the Widget options plugin to effectively manage your widgets.

You can show different types of widgets and banners to different visitors. With this, you can create multiple banners and show to different users based on their interest. It also comes with many targeting options that include specific pages and devices. 

This plugin also improves your conversion and reduces your bounce rate.

For example, You can show a Semrush banner for SEO category readers and a GetResponse banner for email marketing category readers. So you can customize your widgets with better targeting options.

12. Customize your ads

Many bloggers use Google Adsense as one of their sources of income. In that case, you should start optimizing your ads. Limit your ads for less distraction of the users.

Try and test the different ad places to find out which works better. You can also use ad management tools like WP advanced ads and Adsanity to customize your ads.

These ad management tools come with advanced targeting options. So you can customize your ads with better targeting. It also gives you better statistics to find which works better.

13. Create a 404 Page

Don’t have a blank page that shows “ Page not found”. Have some useful links on your 404 page. 

If any users came here because of the broken link, then you have to better direct your visitors to any better landing pages. So have some better navigation on the 404 pages. 

You can also use the 404 plugin to customize your error page much better.

Especially, if you want to reduce your bounce on eCommerce and Shopify websites, having a custom error page is important.

14. Show your authority and credibility

Once a visitor lands on your website and finds the content better, then they need to know about the website or author. I have seen that “About and HomePage” are commonly visited pages in most blogging sites.

It’s because visitors want to know about the website and author. So having positive testimonials and user reviews will improve your trust among the readers.

15. Customize your landing pages

If you are having some important landing pages and pillar content that drives more traffic, then customize that landing page.

You can use page builders like Elementor and Thrive architect to design high conversion landing pages. 

For better conversion landing you should go with Unbounce and Instapage. These funnel builders are highly tested to improve your conversion rates.

16. Optimize for Mobile visitors

Mostly, the SEO-friendly themes are highly optimized for both desktops and Mobiles. But if you are using any new themes or custom-made website structure, then make sure it is responsive on mobiles too.

With the popularity of the web, half of the Worldwide website traffic belongs to mobile visitors. The study shows a regular increase in mobile website traffic.

Number of mobile traffic every year

So it is necessary to optimize your website for mobile responsive and mobile SEO

Use Google Mobile friendly testing to find whether your site is responsive to mobile users.

Check mobile friendly pages

This testing tool shows whether your website is mobile-friendly or not. If not then you need to make it better for mobile visitors. 

In the olden days, every website owner was highly focused only on desktop users. Now the development of technology and Google algorithm updates gives equal importance to mobile responsive websites also. So it is very important to have mobile responsive websites. 

17. Create High quality

Creating high-quality content is also important. Writing a high-quality blog post involves crafting attractive headlines to finish it with a fulfilled conclusion.

When it comes to SEO, the length of the blog post is also an important thing to consider. Craft informative long-form content with different types of images and visuals to make it attractive.

Link out to the important resources on the blog post, which provides much value to the readers.

18. Use Clear Call to Action

Have a clear Call to Action on your landing pages. If you are promoting any products or services, then give a focused and clear CTA. 

This CTA button should make your visitors take the next step. It helps your visitors to take straight action. You can also give some social proof and testimonials to improve CTR on the landing pages.

For example, You can look at the SocialPilot, it is a social media management tool.

Social Pilot - Social management tool

It has a clear call to action. It tells its users to start their free trial or check out their plans. Under the free trial, it is written that “No credit card required”. So it makes an extra point that it is risk-free because no “credit card” is required for a free trial.

It also increases their click-through rate. So when you are selling any products, then do A/B testing to find which works better.

19. Study Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the base for most of the solutions. With the help of Google analytics, you can highly analyze your bounce rate problems.

You can analyze each of your landing pages with their bounce rates and average session duration. Sometimes, doing small changes to your landing pages will highly reduce your bounce rate.

With Google Analytics, you can also track custom campaign links. So better make use of it. 

Conclusion

The above techniques will help to reduce the bounce rate of your website. Optimization is not a one-day thing, we need to improve daily for better conversions.

Use SSD web hosting for your websites. It improves your website loading speed. Managed Hosting companies like WPX offer you free site speed optimization from their experts.

I hope these techniques help you to lower your bounce on blogs and other websites. If you find it useful kindly share it with others. 

Do you have any other better optimization techniques to reduce the bounce rate of the website? Comment below.

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