So you’ve been consistently publishing blog posts and promoting them across social networks and in your email newsletter, but you’re still not getting more leads or sales.

If you’re doing everything right, then what could be the problem?

Studies show that 55% of website visitors only spend about 15 seconds on a website before moving onto another website. This means you have less than 15 seconds to load your website and convince your visitors to stick around.

Whenever you fail to impress your visitors in that time limit, your bounce rate will increase and all your efforts for traffic generation and conversions go down the drain with it.

How does this bounce rate affect your website sales and conversions? And what can you do to decrease your bounce rate? Let’s find out.

What Is Website Bounce Rate?

Website bounce rate is a metric used in website analytics that helps you analyze your website traffic and learn how your visitors engage with your website content.

When a visitor comes to one of your landing pages and immediately leaves without taking any action or browsing other content on your website, this is called a bounce because the user simply bounces from your website to another.

Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave right away without engaging further with your content.

As you can imagine, a higher bounce rate means the majority of your website traffic is useless to you. This can happen for several reasons.

We’ll show you how to fix that, but first, let’s take a look at how to check your website bounce rate.

How To Figure Out Your Current Bounce Rate

If you’re using Google Analytics with your website, then you can easily check your website’s bounce rate using the Audience tab in the Google Analytics dashboard. Simply select a time period and see the audience overview for your blog.

Take this website for example. You can clearly see that this website’s bounce rate is higher than a successful website. The average session duration of the website (or the time a user spends on this website) is only around 1 minute, which is not a good sign.

You can then visit the Behavior tab to see the bounce rate for each page on your blog to see which blog posts perform well and which need to be fixed as well.

If you also see a similar bounce rate in your Google Analytics, then it’s time to start fixing your blog. Follow these tips to get started.

5 Tips to Decrease Your Website Bounce Rate

1. Write Content For Your Audience, Not Google

Optimizing blog posts for keywords is an important part of developing a successful blog. However, sometimes bloggers take this keyword optimization process too far and end up ruining their entire blog by stuffing too many keywords into a blog post.

Remember, even if your blog post gets a #1 rank in Google search results and receives thousands of visitors, your bounce rate will only go higher if your blog posts aren’t informative and helpful.

People will realize that your blog post doesn’t offer useful information to solve the problem they were searching on Google in the first place, and will leave to find solutions on another website.

So, aim to please your audience with your blog posts and provide a solution to their problems. And they will spend more time looking for more great content on your blog in return.

2. Improve Blog Post Readability

Making your blog posts easy and fun to read is another key aspect that will help keep your visitors from leaving your website. You should format your blog posts in a way that allow readers to easily digest the content.

Use big bold subheadings, bullet points, and lots of images to make the content not only easier to understand but also entertaining to read.

Format your blog posts using this strategy to improve readability. Use a casual and conversational writing style that connects with your readers and keeps them entertained.

This will help you get your visitors to keep coming back for more.

3. Optimize Page Loading Speed

According to reports, nearly half of the website visitors only wait 3 seconds for a web page to load before leaving the website. Three seconds! That’s how much time you have to keep your visitors from leaving.

As you can imagine, the speed of your website can strongly affect your website bounce rate. It will also play a role in your search engine rankings as well.

Run a speed test on your website using the Pingdom Website Speed Test tool and see how fast your website performs and what you can do to improve the page loading speed.

Here are a few different ways you can make your website load faster:

• Use a caching plugin
• Connect a content delivery network (CDN)
• Switch to a faster web hosting platform (check out this list of best web hosting providers)
• Minify CSS and JavaScript code
• Use a minimal website theme

4. Use Pop-Ups More Carefully

Don’t you just hate it when a website keeps showing you pop-up messages when you’re just trying to read a blog post?

Yes, pop-up messages are an important part of your lead generation campaigns. But, you shouldn’t abuse this power hoping to get more subscribers for your email list. Showing too many pop-ups too early can result in a bad user experience, often making users leave your website.

However, when implemented well, popups generate the best results. You can improve the user experience of your website by simply timing your pop-ups better.

If you can figure out the perfect time to show a pop-up message to your visitors, then you’ll be able to lower your bounce rate and generate more leads at the same time.

Email opt-in plugins with exit-intent technology can help you achieve that goal. With this technology, you can show the pop-up messages right when a user is about to leave without interfering their website browsing experience.

5. Add Recommended Posts

Suggested posts or recommended posts is a popular trick most blogs use to get visitors to read more content on the blog.

By showing more related posts in your blog to your visitors, you will increase the chances of keeping them from leaving your website too soon.

You can add stylish related posts widgets using a popular posts widget to your sidebar with the WP Tab Widget plugin.

Conclusion

You can also apply these same strategies in your email marketing campaigns to achieve better results and decrease bounce rates.

Using plain text, keeping better structure, optimizing email subject lines, and improving your writing style will go a long way to attract more people to open your emails.

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