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3 Ways to Reduce the Bounce Rate on Your WordPress Website

If you want to do business online, reducing your bounce rate is critical. The longer users stay on your website, the more chances you have to win them over.

Bounce rates affect your conversion rate more than other factors. All the effort you put on your website will go to waste if users leave right away. The question is, what can you do about it?

In this blog post, we’ll discuss what bounce rate is and how to lessen it.

Let’s get started.

What is Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave after visiting a web page without doing anything else. They don’t click on other blog posts or visit product pages. They go back to search engine results or proceed to the next website–possibly your competitor’s.

Let’s say a user lands on one of your product pages after a Google search. They leave after less than a minute without learning more about your business.

Several factors could’ve made the user leave. They might have found your product page confusing or the images too blurry.

This is why it’s important to examine your bounce rate. You’ll see areas for improvement you might have otherwise overlooked.

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To calculate your bounce rate, get the total number of visits to one page. You then divide it by the number of total entries to that page.

If you have Google Analytics, you won’t have to manually calculate your bounce rate. It collects all the information for you, showing the bounce rate for each web page.

The Average Bounce Rate

According to Neil Patel, the average bounce rate is 40.5%. Users spend an average of 190.4 seconds on a website before leaving.

If your bounce rate is higher, don’t be disheartened. The numbers begin to change if you look at the bounce rate per industry. For example, retail websites have an average bounce rate of 20-40%. Content-driven websites, on the other hand, have a bounce rate of 40-60%.

Improve your website speed.

Your website speed could make or break your bounce rate. According to Google, most visitors will leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

If your website is slow, all your content creation efforts will go to waste. People will leave before they even see the blog posts you spent hours writing.

PageSpeed Insights

To make sure your website is up to speed, use PageSpeed Insights. It’s a free tool that scores how fast your website is based on data from Google Chrome users.

Enter your URL and hit enter. PageSpeed Insights will then analyse your website, score it and provide improvement suggestions. It’s possible you’ve been uploading huge images or you need to fix the CSS.

Use the information from PageSpeed as a jumping off point. Create a checklist and tick each task off one by one.

Use a cache plugin.

If you have a WordPress website, a cache plugin could do wonders.

A cache plugin compresses files, making them smaller and load faster. It also shows images as users scrolls down a page instead of making them wait.

There are plenty of available options. The most popular ones include:

• WP Rocket
• WP Super Cache
• W3 Total Cache
• WP Fastest Cache

Supercharge your website content.

After you speed up your website, it’s time to put serious effort into your content. In order to make readers stay, your content needs to be:

• Informative, entertaining, inspirational or all of the above
• Consistent

Consistency is key. Publish content at the same time and day. You’re making it easier for users to add consuming your content to their daily or weekly routine.

Creating and publishing content on a regular basis is obviously difficult. You need to brainstorm ideas users will be interested in, and that isn’t easy. There are some days when ideas won’t come.

Get an editorial calendar.

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Combat those no-idea days with an editorial calendar. It’s where you plan out what you’ll publish on specific days.

If you already know what you’re going to write in advance, you can batch-create your content. For example, you can write three blog posts in one day and schedule them in advance. You can take and edit photos all in one go.

An editorial calendar also lets you diversify your content. In the Cornerstone Digital blog, our main topic is digital marketing for business owners.

We avoid writing about the same topic two weeks in a row. If we see that we wrote about SEO this week, we write about another topic next week.

You can create your own editorial calendar in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. If you’re unsure how to do that, there are plenty of free templates available online. Just enter “free editorial calendar” on Google, and you’ll find plenty of resources.

Write what users want to read.

Some businesses make the mistake of writing about and for themselves. They sometimes forget to take users into account.

You need to find a happy medium. Write about something you and your target audience are interested in. If you’re interested in the topic, it will show and convince readers to continue reading.

Here are some popular blog post ideas:

How-to Tutorials

If you’re doing business online, you’re most likely an expert in something. Display that expertise through your content.

Teach people how to do something. You’re providing value you can back up with facts and personal experience.

Let’s say you own a men’s clothing store in Sydney. You can write a how-to article about choosing the right suit.

List Posts

List posts or listicles are one of the most popular blog post types. Their titles often go like this:

• 3 Reasons to…
• 5 Ways to…
• 32 Blog Post Ideas

They’re so popular, because they tell users what to expect. As soon as you click on a listicle, you can easily skim it. You can find what you’re looking for without wasting a second.

If you own a men’s clothing store, you can write a listicle that features your own products. Some ideas include:

• 3 Men’s Suits You Need to Have in Your Closet
• 5 Ways to Know a Suit Fits Your Body Type

The ideas are endless. Make sure your articles are helpful and present information in an organised manner.

Add internal links.

Have you ever found yourself in a wiki rabbit hole? It’s when a user visits a Wiki page to learn about something. He then emerges from Wikipedia hours later having clicked from one page to another.

Your website needs to have the same effect, and internal links can help you do that.

Examine your old content.

If you blog for business, you most likely blog about related topics.

For example, in the Cornerstone Digital blog, our main topic is digital marketing for business owners. There are several subtopics that fall under it like SEO, marketing strategies and so forth.

Since we write about one main topic, our subtopics are all connected. It’s easy to add links from one blog post to another.

Take a look at what you’ve created so far. See if you can add links to recent or older blog posts. You can also use your old content as a place to find new blog post ideas.

For example, Hubspot has a blog post entitled How to Use Google Calendar: 18 Features That’ll Make You More Productive. There’s a section where they talk about Google Hangout. They then link to another blog post that expands on this section.

Conclusion

Maximise your content creation efforts by ensuring site visitors stay.

Improve your website speed. Use free tools like PageSpeed insights to determine if your website is fast enough. If it isn’t, take a look at your code and image sizes. Remove unnecessary elements.

Your content needs to be better than what’s already out there. Provide entertaining, informative or inspiration blog posts consistently.

Add internal links to increase user interest. If they’re interested in your blog topic, chances are high that they’ll check out related posts.

Cornerstone Digital is a WordPress development company in Sydney. We would be glad to create a five-star strategy for you. Call us on (02) 8211 0668 or email us at info@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.