Reducing bounce rates is important for every website. It is one of the most critical factors that Google considers while ranking. With other things, bounce rate plays a key role to give an assumption about the quality of your website and its content.

In this article, we’ll discuss what bounce rates are, why they are important, how they’re calculated and how to reduce bounce rate on your website, especially for WordPress.

What Is Bounce Rate

Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors of a website who enter the site and then leave which means “bounce” rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site or take any action according to demand.

A visitor’s leaving the website by clicking the back button, closing the tab or window, or typing in a new URL is considered a “bounce”.

A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not enjoying visiting your site, and not finding your content engaging or helpful as assumed before entering.

A low bounce rate indicates that visitors are reading, engaging, and taking the required action, implying that they find your site useful, which is exactly what you want.

How to Calculate Bounce Rate

To calculate the bounce rate, you have to divide single-page sessions by all sessions. That means,

Bounce Rate = Total Visits (Sessions) / Single-Page Visits (Bounces)

For example, 100 people visited your website today and 30 of them left without looking at other pages or taking any action, your today’s bounce rate is 30%. If 30 people entered and 15 left without taking other action, your bounce rate would be 50%.

What is A Good or Bad Bounce Rate

A Website’s bounce rate is considered average, good, or bad depending on its type or industry. According to research by RocketFuel, a Good bounce rate can be 26% to 70%. How is that?

For example, ‍26%-45% is a reasonable bounce rate for an e-commerce site. Because people mostly enter an e-commerce site to buy something, so taking an action is reasonable for them. But in a blog or content website, a 60% bounce rate also can be a good bounce rate.

In a dictionary site, even above 85% bounce rate can be good. Because people visit these sites for specific information. When they find out what they need, they leave without taking any action or viewing other pages and it is counted as a bounce.

How To Reduce Bounce Rate In WordPress Websites

Now we are going to the main topic; How you can reduce bounce rate on your website. We’ll introduce 10 suggestions; five things to do, and five things to avoid. Let’s know in detail:

5 Things You Should Do to Reduce Bounce Rate:

1. Improve the speed of your site.
2. Make Your Site Responsive
3. Create quality content
4. Add internal links
5. Add Navigation Menus

1. Improve The Loading Speed of Your Site

When a visitor arrives at your website, the first thing they face is the loading speed. Today’s online consumers expect fast load time.

An ideal load time can be 2 or three seconds. If your website takes more time to load, it may disappoint your visitors and influence them to leave. Some visitors may identify your site as poor and underdeveloped for the lengthy load.

For fast loading speed, select a quality host and a light theme for your WordPress site. Avoid adding unnecessary plugins, widgets, ads, multimedia, etc. Use compressed lightweight multimedia when necessary.

2. Make Your Site Responsive

Optimizing your site for mobile devices is a must-step to reduce bounce rate.

Nowadays, the majority of internet users access the Internet from a mobile device. So it is obvious that if your site is not responsive, the majority of internet consumers will be uncomfortable with it, and your bounce rate will be high.

Make your WordPress website responsive, and select themes, plugins, and media that are optimized for all devices.

3. Create Quality Content

Quality content is the main key to engaging visitors. If your content does not fulfill keyword demand, it will disappoint visitors and they bounce away.

Make an effort to create relevant, informative, and high-quality content to reduce bounce rates.

Stay consistent with your website’s niche, and conduct good research on your chosen keyword. Invite guest writers who are well-known and trusted by your targeted audience.

4. Add Internal Links

Write several contents on a niche and make them internally linked. It helps to keep readers on your website and lowers the bounce rate.

Internal linking also helps to get a better position in google ranking. Because Google can easily mark your site as a hub and trustable for the niche if you write several contents and add internal links.

But avoid keyword stuffing and make sure that you are adding a link in a relevant word or sentence.

5. Add Navigation Menus

Add Navigation menus and make finding content easier for visitors. It will reduce the bounce rate. Many visitors could bounce because they don’t get fast what they are looking for.

You can add a navigation menu to your website’s header, sidebar, or footer. They will accompany visitors throughout their visit and frequently prompt them to read other content or take action without bothering them like popups.

Make these menus simple and easy. Avoid extra complexity that annoys or confuses visitors and leads to higher bounce rates instead of reducing them.

5 Things You Should Avoid to Reduce Bounce Rate:

• Don’t make the font size too small.
• Don’t use annoying ads
• Don’t use pop-up windows
• Don’t keep Broken Links
• Don’t use hard-to-understand fonts or words

6. Don’t Make the Font Size Too Small

Don’t make your website’s font size small that people hardly understand. Make them medium and easily readable.

The minimum Font size should be at least 14 px. several popular sites with great design make their font size up to 18 px.

Because people normally don’t want to read small fonts that need squinting eyes to see. No matter how much your content is informative and awesome; if people can’t read them comfortably they just bounce and find something easy and comfortable.

7. Don’t Use Annoying Ads

Annoying ads seriously impact a site’s bounce rate. It is understandable that for many websites advertising is the main income source, so you must use some ads, but be aware of where you can place an advertisement and how much you bother visitors with ads, in return how much you pay them by content.

8. Don’t Use Pop-up Windows

There are conflicting opinions on whether popups increase or decrease bounce rates. Some argue that popups help reduce bounce rates if used the right way; at the right time and place.

But many others believe and it is seen in observations that normally visitors don’t feel comfortable with pop-up type instructions or ads. it bothers them and they just leave. So to reduce the bounce rate I advise you to avoid popups.

Yes, In some cases the result can be different. PopUps can increase the implementation rate in some websites if it is used at the right time and position.

If you think popups may be useful in your website, then you should watch the track records of your audience and decide according to them.

Read more: How To Use Pop-ups on Your eCommerce Store.

9. Don’t Keep Broken Links

To get a better position in google ranking, you should add some backlinks as well as internal links to your content. But make sure that you don’t use broken links or that your used links don’t become broken, which means dead by time.

Broken links can increase a website’s bounce rate, and also cause it to lose a better position in google search engine pages.

You need to check your published content often and remove dead links or change them.

10. Don’t Use Hard-to-Understand Words

Make your content as easy to read as possible. Use simple, easy language that everyone understands. Don’t use difficult ‍and rare words to improve literary quality. Prefer easiness and simplification to literary quality.

Last Words

I mentioned 10 strategies on how to reduce bounce rate in WordPress that are crucial. There are other things you can find through your own observation.

Just Keep in mind that you have to give your visitors a good user experience, and create value for them.