A Guide to Reducing Bounce Rates on WordPress in 2021

A Guide to Reducing Bounce Rates on WordPress in 2021

Making engaging content is part of the challenge of website building. Here are some tips for keeping attention and lowering your bounce rate.


Producing content on a regular basis is hard, but making sure people are able to consume your content is another challenge altogether. In a world driven by data and KPIs, one important indicator that you need to track is bounce rate.

What is bounce rate?

It is the rate at which visitors are exiting your site without viewing more of your content. This metric helps you track interest and level of engagement of your visitors.

What is a good bounce rate?

Average bounce rates vary for every industry or type of website you are running. However, a range of about 26 to 40 percent would mean that your website is performing relatively well.

When your bounce rates are high, it means that your visitors do not explore more than one page on your website. This may be cause for alarm, especially for eCommerce or business websites. This could mean that your website does not interest your intended audience.

Exit Rate vs Bounce Rate

Exit rate and bounce rate are the two metrics usually calculated by web traffic analytic tools. They are often interchanged but there is a clear distinction between the two:

Exit rate is the proportion of people who exit your website after having visited other webpages, while the bounce rate is the proportion of people who only visit one page of your website and leave right after.If you’d like a more in-depth review of these two metrics, Google has a very helpful article that discusses the difference between exit rate and bounce rate.

How to reduce bounce rate

It’s important to ensure that your website is optimized for your visitors to continue the consumption of your website after a single visit as bounce rates somewhat impact conversion rates. To help you thrive in this area, here are a few ways you can lower your bounce rate.

1. Keep Your Content Interesting but also Short and Sweet

Brevity is the soul of wit. When writing articles, of utmost importance is making sure that you are writing something worth reading. However, this doesn’t mean that you need to be verbose. Keep it short, sweet and to the point so as not to confuse or bore your readers.

Brevity is the soul of wit. – Hamlet

2. Make Your Menu Easily Accessible & Understandable

Your menu is the main way that your visitors can navigate around your site. This makes it one of the most important assets in lowering your bounce rate. Make sure your menu is easily accessible and not overly crowded to help in the ease of site navigation.

3. Use compelling Call-to-Actions

Call-to-action sections are the key to prompting your visitors to do something more. At the end of each page or post, make sure that you are able to guide your reader to the next step after reading through your content. This will help you funnel your website visitors to conversion.

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4. Use Links to Related Articles or Items

Since your visitor is already interested in the current post or item he is viewing, grab the opportunity to show other items he may also want to check out.

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5. Use Links for Individual Parts of a Series

Sometimes a subject is just too rich for a single article, and writing a series is more appropriate. When this happens it is important to make sure that you include links to all parts of the series so your readers can get the whole story.

How to Write an Interesting Article

Part 2 of 3

In Part 1, we learned that it is important to come up with an interesting and central subject for your post. Here, we will learn about the research skills that it takes to form the basis of your story.

6. Make Your Website Faster

A great way to improve the bounce rate is to simply make your site faster. There are a number of ways that you could speed up your website. If you find that your website takes some time to load, it may be due to your web host. One method you could try is to find a hosting provider that can load your website at a faster rate.

You could also find a competitor of yours that has a really fast website and check who their web host is. Hoo’s Hosting is a really good tool that detects who is hosting a certain website. This could help give you options in choosing a new and faster hosting provider.

Another way is to optimize your website’s assets by compressing images without sacrificing their quality. There are many programs that can do this, particularly ImageOptim, TinyPNG, and Compressor. If you’d like more tips to speed up your website, you can learn more about it in our article.

Recap

Here are a few tips to up your engagement and lower your bounce rate.

  • Keep your content interesting but also short and sweet
  • Make your menu easily accessible & understandable
  • Use inviting call-to-actions
  • Use links to related articles or items
  • Use links for individual parts of a series
  • Make your website faster

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