How to Lower Bounce Rate on Your WordPress Site – 10 Tips

Looking to learn how to lower bounce rate?

😎 Alrighty then… Let’s talk about bounce rate.

To sum it up simply there is only one thing that is important when it comes to lowering your bounce rate. You simply have to get your website visitor to view an additional URL within your website. Yes it sounds simple because it only requires a single action.

The difficult part within this single action is how can you get the majority of your visitors to view an additional page on your website.

The first and most important thing that you must do is analyze your website traffic to see what content is being visited the most on your website. Think of the 80/20 rule where 80% of your traffic comes from 20% of your content.

Hopefully you have some type of traffic analysis software connected to your website like Google Analytics which you can drill down and see the URLs that are the most entered by website visitors. These would be your landing pages or the first URL that the visitor will see on your website.

Once you have your top 20% landing URLs, the next stage in lowering your bounce rate would be to target the content on these URLs and have a strategy on how you can get that visitor to open up another URL. Easier said than done right?

Now this is where the rubber meets the road…

Getting your website visitors to visit another URL on your site is specific to the type of content and visitor that your website has. I’m going to give you a few ideas for lowering the bounce rate that I have personally done for many websites in the past that I have either owned or managed.

1. Paginate The Content – How to Lower Bounce Rate
   What this means is you could split the content into 2 URLs . The visitor would read a portion of the content and then there would be a read more or some type of text hyperlink to take them to the rest of the content which will load a new URL and capture a second page visit.
   
   There are plugins that can do this for you and one of them for example can be found at https://wordpress.org/plugins/pagination/
   
   
2. Call To Action – How to Lower Bounce Rate
   You can create some type of call to action content that visibly stands out pretty well on the page/post and would take the visitor off to an additional URL within your website.
   
   
3. Announcement Bar – How to Lower Bounce Rate
   If there is another piece of exciting content within your website you can create an announcement bar that sits at the top of every page on your website which will contain a link off to an additional URL and entice the visitor to go in this direction and visit that URL.
   
   Here is an amazing list of announcement bar plugins that will help to lower bounce rate at https://themeisle.com/blog/wordpress-notification-bar-plugins/
   
   
4. Exit Intent – How to Lower Bounce Rate
   You may have seen this before on a website when you mouse out of a browser window area or try to go back in the browser a pop-up will appear with some type of call to action message. This could be a great way of enticing them to visit another URL on your website before they leave for good.
   
   Here is an amazing list of exit intent plugins that will help to lower bounce rate https://popupsmart.com/blog/exit-intent-popup-wordpress
   
   
5. Live Chat – How to Lower Bounce Rate
   This one is often overlooked but having a live chat widget on a website can engage the visitor into conversation and within that conversation something can be mentioned to take the visitor to another URL on your website.
   
   Checkout out our list of LIVE CHAT software for your WordPress site.
   
   
6. Related Posts – How to Lower Bounce Rate
   If the visitor is within your blog area and reading articles it is a good idea to have some related posts area and have the display of them attractive and stand out as it might entice the visitor to visit one of those related posts. This one is not super powerful but still useful in reducing bounce rate.
   
   Here is an amazing list of related posts plugins that will help to lower bounce rate https://www.wpkube.com/7-best-related-posts-plugin-wordpress/
   
   
7. Internal Linking – How to Lower Bounce Rate
   It is so important to make sure that you are utilizing internal linking inside of your content. This is such a powerful strategy to reduce bounce rate but also has tons of search engine juice to improve rankings. There are some plugins that will allow you to create a mouse over URL preview of the internal link.
   
   What this means is when the visitor hovers over an internal link it will show the page/post meta title of the URL that it would take them to.
   
   This feature is actually built into the pro version of the RankMath SEO plugin. Side note on this also is to make sure that any external links open up in new windows because if they open up in the same window this will end up being a bounce if the visitor clicks on one of your external links on the landing page that they came in on.
   
   
8. Site Navigation – How to Lower Bounce Rate
   Your site navigation should be clear, immediately understood, and offer the user a seamless experience in getting from one part of your site to another. Visitors shouldn’t have to guess where they are in your site to know how to get around.
   
   
9. Custom 404 Page – How to Lower Bounce Rate
   So many websites have a default 404 page that does not provide any call to action or direction to the user to visit another URL within that same site. So if you can think of what happens, the visitor hits a URL that does not exist anymore and sees a 404 page and instantly either goes back to the browser or shuts the browser window altogether.
   
   There are many plugins available for free that will allow you to design a custom 404 page that has a call to action informing the user what to do next since they reached a URL that does not exist. An even better plan is to manage 404 visits and redirect them to popular content.
   
   Check out the top 7 FREE 404 plugins at https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/6-best-free-404-plugins-for-wordpress/
   
   
10. SPEED!!! – How to Lower Bounce Rate
    One of the biggest reasons that a bounce visit will occur is because the URL that they are landing on within your website takes too long to load. It is so massively important that all the URLs on your website load extremely quickly on both desktop and mobile.

SUMMING UP:
You do not necessarily need to do all of these but it is a good idea to make sure that number 10 is your highest priority and then do some testing with the other nine to see what works best or sprinkle a bit of each into your top 20% of content.

Once you have fully targeted this top content you can move on to the other 80% with the same strategies.

I really hope that these were helpful and you can comment below if you have any questions.