Tools and Suggestions on how to Lower your Bounce Rate

Last Updated on February 15, 2021 by scottkandh

If you’re new to blogging, you probably don’t have too much familiarization with the terminology Bounce Rate.  This blog post talks about the steps you can take to lower your bounce rate and prevent it from going in the other direction.

The first question that needs addressing is:  What is Bounce Rate?

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single page visits (or web sessions).  It is the number of visits in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further. 

What you don’t want on your website is visitors coming to visit, looking around on one page, and taking off.  You need to entice your readers with other things on your page so that they navigate to other pages on your website.  We’ll get how to do that in a moment. 

“The first step to improving your bounce rate is to know what you’re doing wrong.”

Improve your bounce rate – Cab Creative Co.  

Understanding the Bounce Rate

Upon noticing that “my” bounce rate was above 70% and starting to slowly climb in an upward direction is what motivated me to write this post.  I needed to figure out what I was doing wrong. Upon researching information on this topic, I discovered that having a bounce rate greater than 70% that there’s no need to panic.  You can turn 70% into your favor by getting visitors to merely visit just one more page to get a lower %.  

The time to act is when your bounce rates start exceeding 70% on a regular basis.  Before we get into looking at the bounce rates for average, not good, and bad keep in mind that if the percentages are high, there were a lot of sessions that were one-page visits.  On the other hand, lower percentages mean that visitors to a website were engaged.  That “should” be your ultimate goal.  

• The best rates:  under 40%
• Average rates:  41% – 55% or 41% to 50%.   
  From information gathered (to write this post), the average rate can range from 41 – 60%.    
• Above average rates:  56% to 69%, or 51% to 69%.   
• Bad rates:  Rates above 70%. 

How to lower your Bounce Rate

Below are 22 suggestions to lower your bounce rate which we’ll get into right now. (FYI, I don’t like how WordPress messes up numbering format. Usually the information below would have headings, but I prefer to keep the information laid out in a list because of the formatting issues in WordPress). After I’ve had more practice with WordPress, I’ll update this information so that there’s numbers and headings.

1.    Focus on increasing your blogs speed

Look at the blog post:  How to look at the effectiveness of your SEO for some helpful insights to help boost your website’s speed. 

2. You want to ensure that your website is mobile responsive. 

More and more people are using their phones to surf the Internet.  A majority of the “new” WordPress themes are mobile responsive.  If your website design isn’t mobile responsive, you’ll continue to have a high bounce rate making it hard for your website to get a high ranking in Google.

3. Use Yoast SEO plug-in to increase the readability of your posts.

It’ll analyze your post to look at headings, active voice, passive voice, too many words in a sentence, and much more.  The easier your page is read, the better the chances of keeping people from moving to one page to another. 

4.      Use Images

For the topic of readability above, you can also images (in your posts) to break up the text so that it’s more visually appealing.  If you have lists, break them up with numbers or bullets.  Visit the link below for 20 recommended places to get free stock images.

5. Add links that are relevant to your posts. 

After reading your posts, you should suggest to your visitors where they need to go next.  There are several ways to do this.

6. Use widgets or plug-ins to put in your most popular posts into your sidebar. One of my favorite plug-ins is WordPress Popular Posts. Here’s a link to a blog post about 25 Blogging Tools for WordPress.

7. Also use Recent Posts that’s built-in to WordPress.  If you’re Looking for a Recent Posts widget just as featured-packed as WordPress Popular Posts, you can try Recently!  The advantage to using the Recently plug-in is that it’ll add in categories and number of views for the post. 

8. Install the Plug-in:  Jetpack for WordPress

This is a very powerful plug-in with lots of free options (including one to use Related Posts).  The Related Posts will be featured at the bottom of the posts automatically (provided you enable the option). 

If you have a lot of posts, you can start with your Top 10 posts driving traffic to your website.  Place more links to other places (on your website) that are related.  Give the readers what they want. 

9. Install the Plug-in:  upPrev. 

When visitors get down near the bottom of the page (the point that your visitor is approaching 70% of the bounce rate), the program recommends different posts to look at.  You can see this in action by scrolling down near the bottom of the page to see it for yourself.  FYI:  I installed this plug-in on 10/5/2020 and the one below as well (Inline Related Posts) and my bounce rate has slowly changed to 72.6.  I know it’s not stellar, but at least it’s not going in the other direction and with time I believe it’s going to come down gradually.  At one point (before writing this post) my bounce rate was as high as 79%. 

10. Install the Plug-in:  Inline Related Posts: 

I love, love, love this plug-in.  There’s a free version that has basic text options and the paid version (like the one I’m using) that has an image from the blog post to make it pop. 

11. Yoast SEO Plug-in: 

Lastly, you can manually add related posts to the bottom of your posts.  Personally, I like to add them within the body of the post.  One of the best ways to do this is to install the Yoast SEO Plug-in.  (I don’t recollect if the free version does this or not, because I’ve been using the Premium version for so long).  The part I’m referring to is called Internal Linking suggestions.  It will suggest posts for you to add.  If they don’t fall naturally into your post, you can add the suggestions to the bottom of your post. 

What the picture above doesn’t represent is that it will also suggest posts that you need to add to your cornerstone posts.  A cornerstone post is a post that is pivotal to your website and is usually one of your longer posts with lots of content.  To set up a cornerstone post, you just slide the “is this a cornerstone post” button to the right (from no to yes). 

12. Install the Plug-in:  Easy Table of Contents (TOC)

This makes it easier for people to navigate on your website.  Especially useful if you have an exceptionally long post for smart phones.  In order for this to work, you’ll need to ensure that you use H1 and H2 headings in your post.  Then the Table of Contents is automatically inserted into your post (you won’t be able to see the TOC in the edit mode; however, the table of contents will be visible once it’s published). 

13. Update some of your older posts. 

You need to review your older posts to ensure that they aren’t out of date and that they don’t contain obsolete or old information.  There’s a plug-in called WP Last Modified Info.  It adds the last modified date and time automatically on pages and posts very easily.

“Many popular blogs and websites don’t show any date on their articles. This is a bad practice, and you should never remove dates from your blog posts.  So now it is possible to add last modified/updated info on your WordPress posts and pages. Just install and activate this and configuration is very easy.”  – WP Last Modified Info page. 

14. Open your external links in a new tab

By default, your posts are set that they won’t open to another tab.  If your external post is enabled and you don’t open it to another window or tab, it’s seen as a bounce.  After they’re done and they’ve closed the page, they have a chance to come back to your site and continue browsing (if you’ve set it to open to another tab – slid to the right). 

15. Work at your grammar skills. 

The easiest and simplest way to do this is by the program called Grammarly.  It’s not a plug-in.  It’s an extension that gets installed into your browser.  It works seamlessly in the background and points out spelling and grammar errors. 

16. Write longer posts:

Keep visitors coming to your website longer by writing longer posts that give them more chances and opportunities to click to other pages.  Not only do you have the increased chances of having people longer on your website, but Google also prefers longer content which leads to better rankings.  What’s a good range (in terms of the number of words)?  Good question.  1,500 – 3,000 words should be sufficient. 

17. Website navigation: 

One of the best ways to lower your bounce rate substantially is by ensuring that your visitors get to where they want in as few as three clicks or less.

18. Search boxes:

Make sure that your search box is in a prominent place for them to see.  Make it clearly visible.  This might sound funny, but you don’t want your users searching for the search box.  By having the search box in a place that’s easy to find, your visitors can find what they’re looking for to help reduce your bounce rate. 

19. Turn off your pop-ups:

I have to admit I love pop-ups and was guilty of having too many pop-ups.  At one point, I had three pop-ups in a row.  You don’t want pop-ups covering up the words on the page.  Most of the time when I see a pop-up, I turn it off.  By having too many pop-ups you risk the possibility that your visitor will get annoyed and quickly leave.  If you insist on pop-ups at least try to adjust the timing so that there’s a longer delay on the pop-up displaying (i.e. 45 seconds to 1 minute).  Key point! Don’t chase away your visitors.    

20. Update your plug-ins:

Ensure that you keep your plug-ins up-to-date.  If you’re not using a plug-in get rid of it. 

21. Create series posts: 

A series post is a post broken up into multiple posts (for items that are more in-depth subjects).  By having  a series post, the visitors will have to go another page (the whole purpose of trying to reduce your bounce rate). 

22. Create a solid landing page:

Your landing page should have good quality content, links to other pages, and Call to Action (CTA) buttons in the right spots.  Look carefully at the color scheme of your page to make sure it’s visually appealing (i.e. your links, and the size of your fonts on the page). 

23. Analyze your bounce rate with Google Analytics. For a long time, I’ve been attributing my bounce rate being high to just one page. The truth of the matter is that I didn’t truly look at the other blog posts to see how they are fairing.

a. In MonsterInsights, go to See Full Report.

b. Then click on the Publishers Tab (which doesn’t come with the free version).

c. In the bottom right, choose your preference to show x amount of pages; 10, 25, or 50. My personal preference is 50 pages.

d. Then you can copy and paste that information into an Excel document.

e. To make it easier for me to prioritize which pages need the most attention, I decided to put my list into order by the # of visits to each page.

f. I added an extra column to depict notes and also highlighted all of the blog posts that had a bounce rate of 70% or more.

g. The number one thing that could be adversely affecting some of these pages is item #14 above (Open your external links in a new tab). So double-check to ensure that your images are set for new tabs.

h. It’s a guessing game to determine what’s actually having visitors leave selected pages, the best piece of advice is to review your high bounce posts carefully and modify them slightly until you manage to bring your bounce rates down. Update the posts and keep track of your before and after rates so you can see if they are coming down. Ultimately, also pay attention to your posts that have a fair amount of average duration to ensure that you are providing links to those posts to build your website’s site structure. Especially, if they are relevant to the post.

In the hopes of bringing my own bounce rates down, I’m sharing my Top 50 Landing posts with the number of visits, average duration, and Bounce rate as of 2/15/2021. At the moment, it’s not a pressing concern but needs to be looked at. I normally write a monthly self-reflection at the beginning of the month and I’ve already written most of it for my next post. Therefore, my goal is to have better bounce rates (than these) by the end of March 2021.

 Here’s a couple of links to some related posts:

How to set up your WordPress Blog from scratch

How to increase your website traffic without SEO

Free Resource Library and How to Grow Your Blog Series Post

25 Blogging Tools for WordPress

Good traffic, but few subscribers – 20 Simple ways to get new subscribers