How To Reduce My Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is one of the key factors that Google looks at when deciding where it should rank your website. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site quickly.

I’m sure you’ve Googled a term, phrase or keyword and clicked on one of the links to find the information you were looking for. You visit the site only to find the article isn’t exactly what you were looking for so you click the back button.

That my friend is telling Google that the site is not providing valuable content to it’s readers for that term or phrase and people are bouncing away from the site, so after awhile Google starts to move it down in the rankings.

Keep in mind this is not the only factor that affects the bounce rate, there are many others and you’ll want to make sure you know these if you’re hoping to get your website ranked.

In this post I’m going to show you a few simple ways that you can reduce the bounce rate of your website and I’ll also share one instance where having a higher bounce rate is actually not a bad thing.

Decrease Page Load Time

If your site takes about four seconds for a page to load your bounce rate is almost at 25 percent and with every second increase in the page load time your bounce rate goes up about four to five percent.

You can use a free tool called Pingdom.com to actually calculate what the page load time for each of your pages. In order to reduce the page load time you can use a CDN Network called Cloudflare which is a content delivery network.

If you don’t want to use Cloudflare there are multiple ones available but choose one and it will actually help you decrease the page load time.

Remove Unnecessary Plugins

if you’re using WordPress in the beginning, when you’re setting up your website we have a habit of adding a lot of different plugins. Don’t feel bad, we’ve all done it.

As you go along though you’ll realize that it is slowing down your load time. Reduce and delete the plugins that you’re not using for your website because every time a site is loaded all those plugins get loaded along with the site.

This puts a heavy load on the server which in turn makes your site slow to load and people especially nowadays are not going to wait around too long. They want their answer and they want it fast or they’ll find another website.

Learn more about: Must Have Plugins For Your WordPress Website

Image Size

I’ve seen many websites where they will upload PNG images of 1 megabyte. If you have an e-commerce website and on your product page you’re showing four to five different images and if each image is 1 megabytes it will increase your page load time.

A great plugin to use to help with this issue is WP-Smush. It will compress all the web images that you already have so you don’t need to do it manually.

You will notice a huge difference in loading time when you decrease the image sizes and this will actually help you to reduce your bounce rate.

Minimize and Target Content On Your Page

Don’t get over your skis by using too many social media sharing tools, slide-ins, sidebar poppins, etc. Only show the content that is absolutely necessary for the user to take the action that you want them to take.

Make your content above the fold kick-ass. People are lazy and we now have shorter attention spans and they will bounce back if they don’t really see what they’re actually looking for.

If you have an e-commerce page show the key images, the pricing and the size above the fold so user doesn’t have to scroll to see that stuff.

If you’re a blog show key statistics or some information that you think will engage your user and actually make them stay on your site longer and scroll down and even read your blog.

Internal Links

It’s getting more important to link internally from your blog post to another blog post or even from your ecommerce post to other products.

If the user lands on a page and maybe that’s not exactly what they’re looking for, if you have internal links they can click on the internal link and go to another page and might find content that they’re looking for and this will also reduce your bounce rate.

Add Images

If your content has too much text people get bored. Create your page in such a way that you have at least one image available to help break up the text and get their attention.

If you have an ecommerce website make sure you have multiple images above the fold and and the information they need to make a decision.

If you have a blog at least show one image in your post so when the customer lands on your page it could be a chart or infographics that is directly related to the content.

Target The Right Customer

This is extremely critical. l’ve seen people run advertisements or Google ads to bring the customers to the site and they’re trying to cast such a huge net.

If you are bringing in people who’s not really your target audience and they land on a page that’s not what they’re looking for they will bounce right back.

You must understand your target audience and who they are. What problem are they trying to solve? What goal are they trying to achieve? Once you understand that focus your page, post or offer on a solution for them.

When Having a High Bounce Rate Is Not a Bad Thing

In this case, if a user is looking for “how to reduce bounce rate for your website” and I have a blog post that actually answers this question, they land on my blog page.

Now they have spent three to five minutes consuming that content so Google perceives them as a person who’s looking for something, they landed on this page and they have actually spent time consuming the content.

So when they bounce back it actually doesn’t make it a negative thing for you because consumers found what they were looking for.

It’s a bad thing when people land on your site and within two to three seconds they bounced back and went back to Google and actually clicked on the second or the third item in the organic search to find this similar content.

That’s when Google thinks that the person landing on your site didn’t find what they’re looking for so they went on the next result to find the answer to their question.

How To Reduce My Bounce Rate – Conclusion

I hope this has given you some insight on how to reduce your bounce rate. The hardest part of building an online business is getting traffic to your site, please make sure not to waste the traffic you get by having people bounce of your site.

By providing valuable content and focusing on who your target audience is you will be on the right path to reducing your bounce rate.

If you liked this post and if you have other ways that you use to reduce your bounce rate please leave them in the comments below. Don’t forget to check out some of the other posts that will help get you headed in the right direction.