The bounce rate is considered as an important ranking factor in Google search result. Then what is bounce rate? Well, in simple word, a bounce rate is the ratio of the users who visit your page and navigate away to other pages. That means it’s the measurement of how much time your users stay on your page. Clear?

Why this is important and how it affects your site?

Hope, you have understood what bounce rate is. Now tell me, do you want your visitors to come to your site and go back to the search page without reading the entire page? I am sure you don’t. The reason is that only after reading the entire article, your visitor might buy your product or services right? So the less your bounce rate is, the higher your selling chance is.

Other than that, it affects your ranking as well. How? Maybe you have heard that Google ranks higher those pages that are more user-friendly and engaging. That means the more time your visitors remain on your page, the more user-friendly and engaging the page is. It will send a Google an information that your page very engaging and it should rank higher.

On the other hand, if you have a page in the top of the search result and a lot of people visit your page but they don’t remain in your page for a long time then it will send Google a signal that your page is not what people are searching for. Google will drop your page rank very quickly.

So you can easily imagine how this bounce rate is important and how it will affect your site. The higher your bounce rate, the lower is your rank, traffic, and sale. And the lower your bounce rate is, the higher is your rank, traffic and sale. Now the question is that what is a good bounce rate? Let’s have a look.

What is a good bounce rate?

Actually, it depends on your site type. However, according to experts, here is the list of good bounce rate depending on site type.

For the e-commerce and retailer sites, 25-45% bounce rate is good enough.
For the B2B websites, 25-55% is good.
For the websites that generate leads, 30-55% is good.

Non-e-commerce content websites need a 35-65% bounce rate to be called a good bounce rate.

For landing pages 60-90% is good and lastly, 65-90% is called a good bounce rate for dictionaries, portals or blogs.

More than the lists are called a bad bounce rate and this will definitely harm your site. So check your Google analytics and you will find your bounce rate. If it is bad, you should improve the bounce rate. How will you do that?

How to Improve the Bounce Rate on your WordPress website?

Some tips by which you can improve the bounce rate.

Create high-quality content

Content is always the king. If you can provide the users what are they looking for, then the users will definitely stay on your page longer. And in order to keep your users for the longest time, create long content. It is recommended that write 1800+ words content for your blog.

But never ever try to create content with unnecessary words. Your content should be long enough but of course relevant as well as informative. Create your content long by providing as much information as you can. Split your content if it is too long. Try not to keep more than 150 words in a paragraph.

And also, write on the topic. Your audience will love your content, trust you, buy your product or services and overall this will improve your bounce rate.

Site speed

This is another important factor. Think about it. You have searched for something on Google and find out a lot of results. You click on the first result and it takes too long to open. Will you wait for it?

Of course not. You will go back and click on the second result, right?

The same thing happens to your site. If it takes too much time to load then your users will not stay and go back to search result. This will increase the bounce rate. So check your page speed from Google’s page speed insight and try to make your site faster. A website that takes more than 2 seconds is a bad speed website.

User-friendly and responsive website

Make your site user-friendly so that users can navigate through the site with ease. The sidebar, search bars, and menu bars should be easy to navigate. At the same time try to keep your site as fresh as possible. Your users will not like a clumsy website. Additionally, add internal links, this will encourage your users to read more article of your site.

Moreover, now a large number of users are mobile users. So your website has to be mobile friendly and responsive. Have you tested your website on phone, tablet, and computer? Does it show properly? Do your users need zooming to read your content? Check right now.

Links in new window

When using an internal or external link, set it in such a way that it opens in a new tab. If you don’t do that, users will click the link and it will open in the same tab where your page is right now. That means it will increase your bounce rate.

Off pop-up

It’s so simple. No one likes pop-up.

A lot of WordPress websites use the pop-up to send newsletter and collect data. That is not a bad thing if it is done correctly. But even then no one likes it.

Your website will run perfectly without any pop-up. So why pop-up? Try not use any pop-up and this will help you improve bounce rate.

You need traffic to run a website successfully. In order to get the organic traffic, you need to rank your site higher. But with a higher bounce rate, you will never achieve that desire rank. So follow these tips and improve your bounce rate on your WordPress websites.