21 Ways To Reduce Bounce Rate And Increase Engagement

Do you want to reduce the bounce rate and increase the search traffic of your website?

If yes, you're at the right place.

Why?

Because In this article, I'm going to show you 21 ways that will help you to reduce your website's bounce rate.

Even though I've used the same techniques on my websites and improved my site's bounce rate from 80%+ to 63%.

Isn't it good?

Reducing your bounce rate will help you increase your search traffic, increase your sales, increase your email signups, etc.

In this in-depth article, I'm going to break down all the techniques professional marketers and bloggers use on their sites to improve their bounce rate consistently.

Let's dive right in,

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of users who land on your website and decide to leave without taking action, such as going to a second page, clicking on a link, etc.

In simple terms, when a user visits your website or blog webpage and leaves it without going to the second page, it’s called a bounce.

And when we calculate the percentage of users, it’s called the bounce rate.

I know it’s tough to understand, but don’t worry because there is no use of understanding what it is!

But there are a lot of problems with the high bounce rate, let me know you.

Problems With High Bounce Rate

There are a lot of disadvantages if your website’s bounce rate is high; Just like

Let’s have a look at what is a reasonable bounce rate by industry

What Is A Good Bounce Rate? Average Bounce Rate By Industry

Bounce rate is calculated between 0% to 100%, Take a look at the rating of bounce rate according to their percentage;

You can see the average bounce rate by industry in the chart given below:

How Google Analytics Calculates Bounce Rate

According to Google Analytics, the bounce rate is calculated by the total number of one-page visits divided by the total number of entries to a website.

For example, if my homepage receives 1000 visitors monthly and 500 of them leave my site without taking any action, my homepage’s bounce rate will be 50%.

Now you might be thinking, why do people bounce?

So let me tell you some genuine reasons why they bounce?

Why Do People Bounce?

1. Poor Quality Content

The main reason behind the lousy bounce rate is the quality of content.

Nowadays, people don’t want to read long articles; they want a quick and easy way to understand everything.

And if your site is filled with irrelevant and useless content, people will bounce.

So make sure your content should be very high quality and straightforward.

Don’t worry about how to create great content that people love to read; this article will break down all the essential and working tips.

2. Poor User Interface

The second reason may be the user interface of your website!

Nowadays, the theme color of any website, navigation menus, placement of widgets, and texts plays a significant role.

If you want to improve your user interface and decrease bounce rate, you have to use good looking themes and plugins on your websites.

And you’ve to design your pages very well using page builders just like Elementor and Thrive Architect.

3. Slow Page Speed

21 Ways To Reduce Bounce Rate

1. Improve Your Site’s Speed

As I've mentioned earlier, slow site speed is the biggest reason people bounce from your website.

If you want to improve your bounce rate, you've to improve your website's speed.

You can use GTMetrix & Pingdom to test your website's speed and optimize it to make it fast.

But the question is, how can you optimize your site to load it faster?

To speed up your website, you can follow these elementary steps:

4. Use A Cache Plugin - Using a cache plugin on your website is very important. It’ll help you a lot to make your website fast.

I’m using WP Rocket, it’s a paid plugin, but if you want a free plugin, you can use W3 Total Cache.

2. Provide A Better Quality User Experience

3. Use Videos To Engage Your Audience

Backlinko also found that using videos improved their bounce rate by 11%.

4. Use High-Quality Images

5. Use High-Quality Infographics

Just like images and videos, infographics are also one of the best and favorite ways to reduce the bounce rate of any website.

Even after using infographics in some of the articles helped me to reduce the bounce rate of those pages and make them rank higher.

If you don’t know what an infographic is? Don’t worry! Let me know you.

In simple terms, infographics are a visual representation of data or any information that helps users understand the information quickly.

Let me show you a infographic for a better understanding.

The image with a lot of text I’ve inserted above is called infographic.

You can see how informative it looks.

Now you may be thinking about how we can create these types of infographics.

Don’t worry! Let me tell you some of the tools which you can use to create these types of informative infographics.

So these were some excellent tools that you can use to create informative and high-quality infographics for your website.

6. Make Your Content Easy To Read

Bad content readability is also one of the reasons behind the high bounce rate of your site.

It would be best if you make sure that the text you’re using on your website is easily readable on all devices or not.

The font size you’re using on your website shouldn’t be too big or too small; otherwise, readers will have to face some difficulties while reading your articles.

Just like font size, your font style also matters a lot, so make sure that the font on your website is easily readable or not.

If you don’t know which will be the best font for your website, then you can head over to this article.

You can follow these simple tips to make your article readability better;

7. Don’t Use Too Many Pop-Ups

If you’re using a lot of pop-ups on your site, you’re making the biggest mistake.

Because generally, people don’t like pop-ups and 70% users say that they find irrelevant pop-ups annoying?

Rather than using too many pop-ups on your site, you can use an exit pop-up on your website.

For this, you can use a tool known as Thrive Leads. I’m also using thrive lead on my websites and believe me; it’s a fantastic tool.

8. Make Use Of Storytelling

If you want to improve your website's bounce rate without making a lot of effort, this is the best way to do it.

Storytelling will not only help you to reduce your bounce rate even it can also help you to increase your sales, email sign-ups, etc.

Because while storytelling, you're connecting with their emotions. If your storytelling is good, then you can convert any user in a pinch.

9. Keep Your Content Updated

If your content is updated, it’ll help you reduce your bounce rate even if it’ll also help you rank higher on search engines.

Because

People don’t want to read the information provided 5 or 10 years ago; they want fresh and updated content.

And Google also gives reference to updated content.

10. Write Engaging Headings

Headings also play a vital role in improving your bounce rate.

Do you want to know why? Let me know you.

Suppose you’re searching on Google to rank on Google, and you got two results on your screen.

The first result’s headline is How To Rank On Google (9 Techniques), and the second result’s headline is 21+ Experts Guiding To Rank On Google.

Which result will you open?

In my case, the second headline looks good and attracts me.

Let me tell you some tips to make your headline better:

1. Use Emotional Adjectives - As I said earlier, if you want to impress your reader, you have to connect emotionally with them. And using emotional adjectives words like discount, alert, quick, Effortless gives them a signal.

2. Use Attractive Words - If you want to make your headlines catchy, you have to use some attractive words instead of using boring words. Just like if you're going to use well, then use amazing or incredible. I hope you understood what I mean to say.

3. Apart from these tips, there are a lot of techniques you can check here.

11. Use PPP Method To Write Intro Of Your Articles

If you want your readers to spend time on your website and you can also rank higher, then you have to improve the intro of your article.

I use the PPP method to write the intro for 90% of articles, and it works very well.

Let me know what the PPP Method is.

P - Preview

P- Proof

P - Promise

At the beginning of your intro, you have to give a preview of what you’re going to teach them, then you have to show some proofs, and in last, you have to promise them what they will get after reading your article.

Let’s see an example,

For example, if I’m writing an article on how to build backlinks, then my introduction will be something like this.

Preview - Hey folks, today in this article, I’m going to show you nine ways to build backlinks and rank higher.

Proof - Even I’ve used the same techniques on my website and got 39 backlinks within ten days. (You can also add a screenshot of proofs)

Promise - And believe me after reading this article, you’ll also be able to do the same things.

That’s it, nothing complicated.

12. Set External Links To Open In New Tab

It’s a very underrated but compelling technique for reducing the bounce rate of your website.

If you’ll set your external links to open in a new tab, it’ll be beneficial for your readers and you.

We can understand it like this, suppose a user clicks on an external link on your site, they have to click the back button to come back to your website, which means it’ll increase the bounce rate of both of you.

And it’ll decrease your page view too.

But instead of doing this, if you’ll set the external links to open in a new tab, they don’t have to click the back button to come back to your site.

You can use the WP External Links plugin to set all of your external links open in a new tab.

13. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

Is your site mobile responsive? If yes, it’s okay, If not, it’s a massive reason behind your high bounce rate.

According to a study of Search Engine Land, 57% of all online traffic comes from mobile devices.

Keep in mind that mobile visitors have less patience than desktop visitors, so if your website is not mobile-friendly, you’re in the wrong way.

You can use a free tool mobiReady to check how your website is looking at different devices.

And if your website’s button and images are not in a good position, you can fix it.

With the help of this tool, you can see that, according to Google, whether your site is mobile-friendly or not.

14. Design Your Website Perfectly

15. Use Shorter Paragraphs

Using shorter paragraphs will help you reduce the bounce rate of your website, and it also attracts readers to read articles for a long time.

I always try to make my paragraphs very short; one line or maybe two lines is enough.

16. Add Internal Links & Related Posts to Your Page

If you want your reader to spend more time on your website, you have to focus on adding internal links and related posts to your pages.

17. Attract The Right Audience With Right Keywords

18. Make Your Site Easy To Navigate

If your site navigation is not structured, then many people will bounce from your site.

So make sure that your site should be easy to navigate. But how to do it?

The first thing you have to make your site structure very well just don’t put anything anywhere.

Your navigational menus, Call to action button, and Lead capture forms should be placed in a good position.

Try to put only 5 or 6 menus in your navigational menu; add a sub menu, but don’t overfill it.

19. Improve Your Copy Writing Skills

Copy writing is one of the best ways if you want to reduce your bounce rate and increase conversions.

I know copy writing is not an easy task, but believe me, if you give at least 30 minutes or 1 hour a day, you can improve your copy writing skills quickly.

Here’s a fantastic video of Brian Dean about Copy writing:

20. Start A/B Testing

Maybe the reason behind your high bounce rate is your headline, intro, or maybe your call to action.

That’s why it’s essential to perform A/B testing.

Now you may be thinking that what is A/B testing? It looks like a very technical term, don’t worry. Let me know what it is.

So what you have to do is change your headline, your intro, and check which one works best.

I’m also trying it on my websites, and for now, it’s giving me an excellent idea about what my readers like.

21. Use A Table Of Contents

We all know that long-form content works very well when it comes to getting links, social shares, higher rankings, etc.

But there’s a massive problem with long-form content.

The problem is that it’s tough to find any specific term, the technique you’ve shared in your article.

Using a table of content in your article makes it very easy to jump on any specific term your readers want to know about.

I’m using a free plugin called Easy Table Of Contents, and you can also use the same one.

FAQs

Conclusion

In this article, I’ve shared 21 ways to improve the bounce rate of your website.

These are the exact techniques that helped me to improve the bounce rate of my website too.

Apply all the techniques and share your results with me.

If you have any doubts or suggestions, kindly let us know in the comment section.