Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your website and leave without navigating to another page. If you have a low bounce rate, it means the majority of the people who come to your site will have a good old nose around while they’re there. Having a low bounce rate therefore suggests your site is filled with fabulous content that people love to read!

It’s worth noting here that the average bounce rate for blogs is 70-90%. At the time of writing, my bounce rate for the last 30 days is 74% (I got that from my Google Analytics; you can do the same). Ideally, I’d love to get my bounce rate lower than 70. Here are ten ways to do that…

how to decrease your bounce rate

1. Attract the right visitors: make sure your post titles and meta descriptions are a good indicator of what the post includes. If the person clicking your link intends to be there in the first place, they’re more likely to stick around. If they’ve read a misleading title and clicked through to find the content is not what they’re after, they won’t stick around.

2. Include links to other posts – both within the text of your posts (where relevant), and at the bottom. You can do this with services like Link Within and Shareaholic.

3. Choose your keywords carefully. Make sure that if you’re using keywords in your post, they match the specific content properly. There’s no point in stuffing random keywords into a post in the hope of getting a few clicks, if people are not going to stick around when they get to you.

4. Check how user-friendly your site is. Ask a friend to have a look at your site to assess how easy it is to find things like a search bar, menu and other content. Joanne Dewberry offers a “5 Things for £5” service where she will check over your blog and give you a list of 5 things you can do to improve it and this is well worth doing.

5. Make sure your text is readable. “Handwritten” fonts look pretty, but how easy are they to read? When faced with something that’s not immediately clear and easy to read, most people will click away – no matter how fantastic the content is. Avoid using light text on a dark background; it’s difficult to read. Use a reasonably large font, a large headline and employ the use of white space to break up text. Bulleted lists also make posts easier to read when people are busy.

6. Set all links to open in new windows. This is a really simple one. If you’re including a link in your post, make sure it will open in a new window, and not cause your reader to click away from the post they’ve been reading.

7. Optimise your page load time. WordPress has thousands of plugins you can download, but each one you add will slow your site a little more. Lots of photos will also slow down the pageload and in this age of immediate access to everything, nobody wants to wait even a few extra seconds for a page to load.

8. Avoid pop-ups. I can’t be doing with pop-ups asking me to sign up to email lists or provide feedback or download a free e-book. A lot of other people can’t either, and they will click away rather than search for the little “x” symbol to close the window and read your blog.

9. Share your most popular posts – A short list in your sidebar of the most popular posts on your blog is a great way of making sure people will stick around. If a post has been really popular with other readers, it’s likely that new readers will want to read it too.

10. Choose your headlines carefully – Take a look at this headline. It does exactly what it says on the tin. This doesn’t just mean that people clicking a link to this post will stick around, but when they’re wandering around the rest of the site, they’re more likely to click in to read other posts if the headline makes it clear what they’re about.

 

Basically, what you’re trying to do is make sure someone who ends up clicking onto your site is encouraged to stick around. Make it easy for them to find more great things to read, and make it easy for them to read it.

What do you think? Do you know of any other great ways to lower the bounce rate of a blog? I’d love to hear your opinions!


Vicky Charles

Vicky is a single mother, writer and card reader.

13 Comments

Pen · 07/05/2015 at 08:30

Thanks for the great tips

    Vicky Charles · 07/05/2015 at 09:16

    Thanks, I hope people will find them useful.

Joanne · 07/05/2015 at 11:51

Thank you for the mention lovely.
I agree with the links opening to new pages. It’s so annoying as a reader to get swept off somewhere else. But also bizarre’s me why you would want your website shut down. I have at least 10 tabs open at the same time to something I want to come back to, comment on or link to in my own posts.

    Vicky Charles · 07/05/2015 at 15:12

    I always have loads of tabs open but then something happens and I end up closing them all and not reading all the stuff I meant to read!

Cathy (MummyTravels) · 07/05/2015 at 12:14

Nice tips – my bounce rate is finally hovering under 70% for the first time thing month, and I’ve been inching it down to closer 70 than closer 75 for a while, so nice to see more suggestions. Even just adding a plugin for more posts made a noticeable difference when I finally got round to doing it (and kicked myself for not doing it AGES ago)

    Vicky Charles · 07/05/2015 at 15:11

    Ah brilliant! you’re a pro at all this by now then!

Orana · 07/05/2015 at 13:12

Great Tips!
I´ve been trying to get my site to be more friendly. I will implement some of these ideas. I have a pop up subscriber thingy and now I dont know how to get rid of it….

    Vicky Charles · 07/05/2015 at 14:58

    Oh no! Did you put it on or did someone else? Try looking through your plugins to see if it’s one of them…

Littleoandme · 08/05/2015 at 21:47

Great tips, thanks for sharing. I really need to include links to other posts more.
#Weekendbloghop
Becky xx

Leigh - Headspace Perspective · 16/05/2015 at 17:33

Hmm Google Analytics says my bounce rate is 61% which I was really pleased with until I noticed it also says haven’t had any page views on several days which fortunately isn’t true! Either its confused or something’s wrong…xx

    Vicky Charles · 16/05/2015 at 21:23

    Oh dear that’s no good! I’m afraid I don’t know much about Google Analytics, but I suppose you could try re-installing the code on your page?

Lucy · 11/01/2016 at 09:51

Thank you. My new blog is not very old and hasn’t got enough content yet so my bounce rate is still high but it is something I will be keeping and eye on

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