Hello friends,

Do you get high bounce rate reports in Google Analytics? And do you want to know how to lower it?

Then you are reading the right post at TheCMSPlace! Here I will present to you several steps that will allow you to lower the bounce rate of your WordPress website.

Before we begin, we must discuss what bounce rate is.

Let’s imagine the following situation – you visit a page on a website. Then you decide to leave the website immediately by either closing your browser window or moving to a new tab or website. In any of these cases you have made a bounce because you didn’t visited any other page on this specific website. Each bounce increases the percentage of the overall bounce rate and if it is too great then this might be a bad ranking signal for the search engine bots and your SEO strategy will suffer.

There is also a bounce rate metric for any of your website’s pages and its purpose is to define which of your pages are causing more bounces.

What is the difference between bounce rate and exit rate?

Bounce is a immediate leave without any interactions. Exit means that the visitor has made some interactions with your website’s pages and has left the website from one specific page.

Is the zero or extremely low bounce rate a good thing?

First of all you might never experience such a result or let’s just say that this happens very rarely. There is always a fair amount of bounces. But if you encounter such metrics then you should know that the extremely low (or zero) bounce rate is just as bad as the extremely high one. In this case there might be some problem with your analytics tracking code. For example you may have inserted it more than once in the code of your pages. This will send a negative ranking signal so make sure that you discover the problem and fix it as soon as possible.

Remember – a fair amount of bounces is always something normal.

Now to the main point – how to lower the bounce rate of your WordPress website?

If it is too high then you need to make sure that your visitors can interact with your pages. First of all you should consider improving your content. Write useful posts that your visitors will read. Use suitable images and language. Make sure that your text is in a suitable tone and that there are no punctuation and grammar mistakes. Insert videos that are related to your main topic. There needs to be something in your posts that the visitors will interact with!

Once you do this then its time to imrpove the internal link structure of your posts and pages. This is very important for various reasons. It is extremely useful to provide links to related or similar posts in any post/page of your website. Also your menu structure should allow your visitors to reach any page with a single click or two clicks at maximum.

You can find more information about this in point 5 of our post 7 ways to improve your WordPress On-Page SEO.

There you will also find suitable solutions in the form of plugins that will allow you to build better internal links in order to reduce your overall bounce rate.

Another useful technique is to show popups that will ask the visitor to interact with your content before leaving. You may ask them to subscribe for your newsletter or to check a special offer or something else.

A suitable plugin for this purpose is OptinMonster. It is a premium optin popup tool created for marketing purposes. In our specific case you will be able to ask your visitors to make some interactions before they leave your website. And who knows they might even like to stay a while longer and even return regularly.

Another suitable plugin is Icegram. It is free and you might just find it the best solution for your WordPress website.

Last but not least – make sure that you are using your widget areas wisely. Putting a useful content there will also help you reduce your bounce rate. This might be more internal links for related articles or a some social media plugin.

So there you have it friends. If you have any questions or other feedback, please share them in the comment section below. Thank you and see you soon!