How to Lower your Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the term whereby a visitors comes to your site and then leaves without viewing any other page.

In a way this is measuring user engagement, particularly of new users. First impressions count and you need to get new visitors interacting with your site.

There are many different tactics you can employ to try lower your bounce rate, here is what we have come up with:

1. Homepage Post Optimisation

On the homepage of your blog or website you will have your main articles and information. Don’t provide the full stories on the homepage, just display an excerpt.

This will encourage users to come to your homepage, see what content you have and then click onto it.

2. Posting Frequency

If you have regular readers/ visitors to your site, make sure there is a constant flow of new content. If you don’t update enough then your regular readers will come to your homepage and then leave.

3. Site Navigation and Related Content

Make sure your site navigation is easy to use, and that every article or post has a list of related content.

Someone may find one of your posts via a search engine, when they have finished reading it provide related links at the post end to encourage them to view more of your site.

4. Homepage RSS Feed Subscribe Pop-up

You may notice the following: Many websites these days, as soon as you visit the homepage the site will load up, then after about 5 seconds you will get a RSS Feed subscription pop-up – which effectively blocks out everything else on the page.

You are forced to their subscribe to the sites RSS feed, click the X button, or just exit the site all together.

Having this feature may build your RSS subscription list much quicker, but you are obviously going to annoy a lot of your website visitors at the same time. I wouldn’t do it on a general basic, but I gather some niches may be more accepting that other, eg Email Marketing sites/ blogs 🙂

5. Check your website stats

Last by not least, check your website statistics to see if any reffering sites are producing a high bounce rate. Maybe you post your articles onto a particular social network and the incoming traffic is bouncing at a high rate.

You may then like to consider if you even need this kind of traffic or you could do without it.

We hope these tips help you lower your bounce rate, if you can think of any more then please let us know in the comments section below.

What do you think is an acceptable bounce rate %? It really does depend on the kind of site you have.