You’ve setup your website and you’re starting to get traffic to your pages. Building a website can be hard work, but you’ve made it this far. Now, how can you get visitors to stay on your website and look over your pages?
Have you ever visited a website and after viewing the first page, decided to go back to Google to look for something else? This is called bounce rate. It is the percentage of website visitors who come to your website and leave before visiting another page.
Today we want to share a bit more about bounce rate and give you a few steps to help lower your website’s bounce rate.
- How to check your bounce rate in Google Analytics
- How to improve your bounce rate on your WordPress website
- Conclusion
High Bounce Rate: How It Affects Your Website
If your WordPress website has a high bounce rate, this can be detrimental to your business. It can lower ad revenue, lower SEO standings, and limit conversions through your website. By giving your users more worthwhile content, you’re allowing them more time to get engaged with your product or service. This can help increase your conversion rate.
Bounce rate for WordPress websites is often overlooked by webmasters and business owners alike. This is why it’s important to give this metric some attention and gain a competitive edge on rival websites.
How to Check Your Bounce Rate in Google Analytics
If you have not setup Google Analytics on your website, you can do so by following the instructions on our guide.
Checking your bounce rate in Google Analytics is easy to complete. Go to your Google Analytics page and click the “Overview” tab under “Audience”.
Your bounce rate is displayed as a percentage along with your page views, sessions, users, and average duration. For a more in depth analysis you should check the bounce rate of individual pages. You can also check the percentage of users using tablets, desktops, and mobile devices.
What is the Perfect Bounce Rate?
The average bounce rate for WordPress websites is around 40 percent. As a rule of thumb, you should aim for a bounce rate between 40 percent and 50 percent. Anything lower than 30 percent, or higher than 70 percent, means that you either have problems with your website, or it’s not being measured correctly.
High Bounce Rate Legitimate Reasons
Although the perfect bounce rate should be around 40 percent, there are some legitimate reasons for a higher-than-usual bounce rate. Here are a few examples:
Social Media Traffic & Paid Traffic
Paid ads and social media campaigns tend to have a higher bounce rate, whereas organic traffic generally will have a lower bounce rate. If you are running a paid traffic campaign your overall bounce rate for your website may be higher.
While this is not a reason to worry, it could mean that your paid traffic campaign is not targeting the proper audience. It could also mean that your landing pages are not optimized for conversions.
Blog Posts
Your blog can bring in lots of traffic if properly managed and updated. log posts tend to have a higher bounce rate than regular website pages. This is because users come in, read the information that interests them, and then leave the page.
Blogs also tend to attract a specific audience which are looking for a specific topic, rather than visitors with an intent to buy your product or service. If you are getting a high bounce rate on your high traffic blog, you should look into directing that juicy traffic into your sales funnel through calls to action.
Mobile Users
Mobile visitors tend to have a higher bounce rate. If your website gets a majority of its views from mobile devices, it is likely that your average bounce rate will be high.
How to Improve the Bounce Rate on a WordPress Website
Improving the bounce rate of your WordPress website can be challenging. Some changes are not particularly difficult, while others may need more work. User interface changes can help your bounce rate.
In the steps below, we will share specific steps on how to improve your website’s bounce rate.
1. Create Better Content for Your Visitors
Your website visitors are always looking for worthwhile and insightful content regarding a product or service. They are honestly interested in something you may offer, so why not offer genuine content? Satisfying their needs will reduce your bounce rate and increase your overall conversion rate. This can also help you become a specialist in your field.
User Proper Formatting and Keyword Placement
By using keywords in your titles and headers, you’re allowing users to quickly skim through text and judge if it’s valuable to them or not. Images are also important as they help to bring space between text and give some variety.
Have clear Call to Actions (CTA)
Having a clear call to action will help your users know what they need to do to get a price quote for a product or service. Any website is a journey and call to actions are flags that plot its course.
Know your Audience
Get to know your visitors more and provide relevant information according to their needs. This is also important if you have a niche website. Your visitors will reward your efforts with higher conversions and more leads.
2. Improve your Loading Speed
Nowadays slow loading websites are a thing of the past. Your bounce rate could be caused due to slow loading speeds. Slow websites can cause your visitors to leave if a page takes over 3-3.5 seconds to load.
Test your website’s loading speed by using GTmetrix and try to implement their suggestions. Getting a caching plugin for your WordPress website is also a great idea. WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache are to name just a few that are the best plugins for the job. If you took these steps and are still not satisfied with your loading speed, you can upgrade your WordPress hosting package for increased speed.
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3. Focus on User Experience
If visitors are not able to navigate through your website with ease, you’ll have a huge bounce rate. There are a few easily implementable tips you can use to boost your user experience and lower your bounce rate.
Be Responsive
Having a responsive website is essential nowadays as more and more users browse the internet and shop through mobile phones. If you want to build a WordPress website, it’s a good idea to pick a responsive theme.
Make Navigation Easier
Sidebars, menus, and search bars are to help your visitors find and read valuable content. Focus on optimizing the placement and visibility of these tools.
Organize Your Content
Online content should always be enjoyable. Consider making your content easy to read by adding lists, bullets and plenty of white space.
Internal Links
Always have internal links throughout your blog posts. It’s great for search engine optimization (SEO) as well as for your users. This allows them to quickly access articles which they might find interesting.
4. Split Up Longer Posts
If you’re publishing very long blog posts or articles, you can split them into multiple pages by introducing a next page tag into your post. With that being said, you shouldn’t abuse this technique as having a lot of pages and little content might make your article less easy to read. This may actually increase your bounce rate. Ideally, you should create articles which are long enough to be read in a few minutes. If your post is over 2000 words, consider splitting it up.
5. Set Links to Open in New Windows
By setting links to open in a new window, you’re not only helping your visitor and overall user experience, but you’re also lowering your bounce rate. By setting your external links to open in the same tab, you create something called back button fatigue. This is when users have to push the back button multiple times to resume their reading of an article. Setting links to open in new windows is very easy to accomplish on a WordPress website.
6. Are Pop-ups Worth It?
Most WordPress websites use pop-ups to grow newsletter databases or to engage users. This might not be a bad idea if done properly. Some websites tend to spam visitors with annoying pop-ups and offers. These pop-ups lower user experience and makes the site unbearable to use.
A study conducted in 2013 revealed that 70 percent of users find irrelevant pop-ups annoying. Where do you draw the line on adding a pop-up? Is growing your newsletter database worth the boost in bounce rate?
Objectively speaking, your website will still function properly without popups whatsoever. One thing that you can do which will help is to set your popup strategy according to your bounce rate.f your bounce rate is good or great, you can allow some limited popup use. If it’s not and you want to improve it, just scrap the popups and see if you can reintroduce them in a couple of months.
7. Have a Responsive Website
Having a mobile-friendly website is a must nowadays. Don’t believe us? Let’s check the stats.
According to TechHive, 68 percent of all “likes” on Facebook come from mobile devices. 73 percent of all shared and uploaded photos from Facebook and a whopping 88 percent of all shared and uploaded photos on Twitter came from phones. 90 percent of links shared on Twitter also came from mobile.
Nearly half of all emails are opened on a mobile device. You need to integrate mobile into your marketing efforts. This includes your website, a mobile-friendly newsletter, QR codes in business cards, flyers, or any other campaign you’re running.
Is your site mobile-friendly? Did you test it on tablets, phones, and other devices? Does it display properly? Do visitors need to zoom in to be able to read your content? Your high bounce rate can be tied with a lack of mobile friendliness, but it can get even worse than that. Mobile friendliness is also a ranking factor with Google. This means that you’re not only losing out on valuable mobile customers but also your SEO ranking.
How to check if your WordPress website is mobile friendly:
- Go to Google’s mobile-friendly test tool
- Introduce your website’s URL
- Click “Analyze” and wait for the results
If your website is not mobile friendly, you can make it responsive by using a plugin that activates your mobile theme. If you want to start building a new site, it’s a good idea to pick a mobile-friendly theme from the start.
8. Write Unique Meta Descriptions for Your Visitors
Meta descriptions are also often overlooked and only a few websites write unique meta descriptions for each of their pages. By not keeping meta descriptions into perspective, you’re setting yourself up for a low click-through rate and a high bounce rate. Here are 3 tips on writing great meta descriptions for your pages.
- Your meta description should be around 150-250 characters long.
- You should include your targeted keyword in the description only once. Keyword stuffing is a bad practice.
- Include a call to action in the meta description.
9. Start Targeting Keywords With High Value Traffic
Proper research is the base of your content marketing efforts. Picking the right keywords can make or break your campaign. When talking about high value keywords we are not referring only to the number of monthly searches, but a mix of a particular keyword conversion value, traffic value, brand value and persona value. Keywords can be either informational or commercial.
Informational keywords can be used to create awareness for a specific product or service. For example, “real estate return of investment 2018” can be an informational keyword.
Commercial keywords are more focused on buying a specific product or service. These keywords tend to have better conversion and bounce rates since they are bringing in customers, not just visitors.
By creating in-depth content with commercial keywords, you’re targeting committed customers.
10. Keep Your Blog Fresh With Relevant Content
A study by HubSpot revealed that companies which regularly update their blog with relevant content will generate 126 percent more leads than businesses which neglect their blog and readers.
But what is “relevant content”? Relevant content needs to be attractive and easy to read, but practical enough to be applied as well. Your readers are looking for answers to a particular problem they are facing. Ideally, you would write content that includes implementable tips which produce results, e.g., solves their problem.
Good fresh content also builds brand trust and sets you apart as an expert in your respective field.
Conclusion
These are the best ways to improve your bounce rate on a WordPress site. By applying these tips you’re not only boosting your overall website conversion rate, but also putting your blog to good use, generating valuable leads and providing a better surfing experience for your visitors. Keeping true to your audience. Satisfy their needs time and time again. This is the fastest path to success.
This article is written by WP Estate, a company specialized in WordPress development for the real estate market. With three premium WordPress themes in their portfolio, WP Estate provides unrivaled products to everyone who wishes to build a successful online real estate platform.
