Bounce Rate – What it Means & How to Use it

If you are active on the digital platform in an effort to make your website or blog more productive, then you have already heard about bounce rate.

If you are unfamiliar with this term, we’ll try to explain before touching on the practical ways to use it for the benefit of your site.

1. What is a bounce rate?

If we try to define what a bounce rate is in simple English, we’ll define it as a percentage of your site’s visitors who come to your site and bounce or leave it in seconds without visiting other pages.

It’s one of the frequently used marketing terms in web analytics directed at reducing the website’s bounce rate and increasing pageviews.

All in all, it’s one of the basic performance and results indicators use by thousands of website and blog owners across the globe.

2. Is a high bounce rate a reason to worry?

Now, that you know what a bounce rate is, it should be clear to you that a high bounce rate is inversely proportional to your online success. In the majority of cases, the homepage serves as a gateway directing your website visitors to its important parts and pages.

And if your website visitor is landed on the homepage and leaves it without any continuation, you need to find effective countermeasures to it.

As you can guess, your website’s bounce rate has to do with conversion optimization. Although potential blog visitors are only one click away from your virtual domain, you need to sweat hard in order to keep them and win their time. Hence, if you want to complete your conversion goals, you must take care of reducing the bounce rate.

3. How to analyze and use a bounce rate?

The most practical tool to reveal the average bounce rate of your site and pages is Google Analytics: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/provision/?authuser=0#provision/SignUp/

Use this tool to get all the important data and insights about your site’s results and bounce rate, and generally, track the relations between you and your audience based on what you offer them on your website.

You might want to go to Content, Site Content, Pages in Google Analytics to find the pages with the most pageviews with their relevant bounce rate.

Head over Traffic Resources, All Traffic, where you can find the sources bringing the most visitors to your pages with their relevant bounce rates.

You might also want to see the best keywords bringing the most visitors from search engines with the relevant bounce rates. For this, you need to go Traffic Sources under Search, Organic.

Of course, you are free to rely on other analytical services and methods to receive the needed information.

4. How to reduce a bounce rate?

Now, let’s boil down to the most effectual methods and strategies to reduce the bounce rate of your WordPress powered site.

Make sure you site has an optimal loading rate and quick perfomance

The digital audience is unlikely to tolerate a slow working or loading site. This equally refers both to desktop and mobile users. All in all, heavy loading websites kill the interest of the impatient visitor and thus increases your site’s bounce rate.

WP Optimize:

It is one of the simple plugins ready to optimize your website for a preferred performance and not only. It also takes care of removing all unnecessary data, performs clean ups, etc. so that your website will be clean and lightweight all the time.

W3 Total Cache:

W3 Total Cache is another caching plugin to lighten up your digital life and greet your blog visitors with powerful and speedy workflow.

Interlink your posts

Make it easier for your visitors to navigate through your site and find more articles and publications. Insert links into your articles and make people spend more time by following those links and reading them. This will result in a more timespan spent on your profile, which will inevitably have an effect on your bounce rate.

However, while using this interlinking technique, be sure that the structure of your article is accurate enough and the inserted links make sense altogether.

Showcase related posts and pages

Offer other pieces of content that you think might interest to a target visitor. One your blog reader is done with 1 article, you can link him to other relevant articles as well by “inviting” him to read them (We thought that you might like…. or something like this) or to go through the related posts.

Use pagination method to split up long content

Rendering your site content with small portions is one of the best methods to reduce bounce rate. If you split up your long content and showcase it with several pages, you will definitely improve your site’s user experience and post readability.

Use pagination by inserting tag into your post and grant your website visitors with additional navigation options.

WP Paginate:

It is one of the user friendly WP plugins to add the pagination functionality to your profile. It will help you in displaying your posts in a more easy to digest way and will improve your SEO ranking. As a result, you will notice an “improvement” in your bounce rate.

Use the sidebar for interactive content and useful pages

A sidebar is one of the essential widget ready areas of your WordPress site ready to host any kind of additional content. As for the anatomy of an excellent sidebar, it always includes something attractive for your users.

Sidebars are important not only for the overall design and structure of your site, but also for drawing your web user’s attention on whatever you want. Feature top rated and popular posts rather than big banners and advertisements in your sidebar.

Match visitor requirements and expectations

Create and display a content that is relevant to your visitors and that your visitors expect from you. Also choose relevant formatting, images and videos to your posts.