11 Proven Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate in 2024 (Tips That works)

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  • What is bounce rate?
  • Why does this metric matter for a blog or a website?
  • What are all ways by which you can reduce the bounce rate?

This is what you will learn in this guide about bounce rate.

Reduce Bounce Rate for your blog and website
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We keep talking about increasing traffic to our website, but two important factors which we often fail to consider are user engagement and user behavior.

These factors matter a lot and are something you should always pay attention to. When a site gets 10,000 hits a day, but all visitors leave the site after visiting only one page, it is not likely a quality site.

Note: There are exceptions in cases, where users find the answer to a question on the page itself. For example, the meaning of words.

In this post you will be learning:

  • What is Bounce Rate?
  • What is idle/good bounce rate
  • How to reduce bounce rate?

Your site’s bounce rate is a great measurement of the success of your blog. Maintaining a good bounce rate is difficult but not impossible.

I will share a few tips which have been successful in helping me to reduce the bounce rate of my website. They should be helpful to you as well.

What is the bounce rate?

The bounce rate is the best way to analyze the activity of your blog’s visitors. It refers to the percentage of visits during which a visitor lands on your blog post and leaves that page without visiting any other page on your site. There are visitors who bounce soon after landing on your blog post. It is up to you how you welcome visitors to your blog and attract visitors to other blog’s pages as well.

First, let’s get some facts straight:

  • The lower your bounce rate, the better.
  • High bounce rates are bad for your website.
  • “Exit rate” and “bounce rate” refer to two different things.

This Wiki article explains how you can calculate a bounce rate in simple words:

Bounce rate = View/Entry

  • Entry: Total # of people who landed on the page
  • View: People who viewed one page only

If you are using Google Analytics, you can log in to your site’s dashboard and check the bounce rate for a particular time frame. If you have made any design changes in the recent past, I would suggest that you compare bounce rates before and after the design change.

decrease bounce rate
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Alright, now it’s time to implement strategies that will help you lower your bounce rate and make your readers stay more on your blog/website.

So, let’s do simple calculations to understand how it works:

Suppose this post gets 100 visits, and 50 people leave the site after viewing this page. Their exit could be for any reason — they moved to another site, closed the tab for some reason, they don’t browse other pages, etc.

So the bounce rate (B.R.) for this page would be :

B.R: 50/100 = 0.5 or 50% B.R.

Let’s look at some of the reasons why bounce rates get so high and why you should avoid it like the plague…

Why your bounce rate is so high?

1. Slow Page Load Time

People leave your site the instant your page refuses to load up fully (in 4 seconds or less). There are loads of other useful websites that write about the same topics as you, and if they have faster websites, you will lose your traffic to them. If you do not want your audience to be taken away by your competitors, be sure to invest in a good, reliable, and speed-oriented web host.

2. Too Many Intrusive Advertisements

Some people are here to make money online, but focusing too heavily on that distracts your audience. Readers will get annoyed by too many ads.

3. Annoying Pop-ups

Pop-ups are another reason people leave a website before it even loads. Especially these days, we have so many pop-ups, such as:

  • Welcome mat
  • Cookie consent pop-up
  • Advertisement pop-up
  • Push notification subscription

Of course, they are important for the business, but you need to configure them properly.

Features like

  • Exit intent
  • Time-delayed pop-up
  • Pop-up based on traffic type
  • Relevancy

Could help in retaining users to your website.

4. Terrible and Unhelpful Content 

Sadly enough, many internet marketers fail hugely in the business of writing quality-filled and helpful content. What they do is just regurgitate the content already shared on other blogs, and in the process of editing these pieces, they trash the most useful parts and serve their users half-baked material.

Now, I know what’s on your mind…

You’re already wondering how you can easily cut down your website’s bounce rate.

If that’s correct, then consider yourself lucky because I’m about to show you 7 easy steps to fixing your high bounce rate.

Just be sure to grab a seat, pour a cup of coffee, relax, and pay attention.

But before I jump into sharing how to reduce your site’s bounce rate, I’d like you to take a quick stroll to your Google Analytics dashboard.

  • If your bounce rate is under 65%, you are fine.
  • If it’s from 65% to 80%, you should be worried.
  • If it’s 80% or higher, read and implement these points ASAP.

5. Design and load time

They say the first impression is the lasting impression, and this goes for blogging as well. When a visitor lands on your blog, the first thing he notices is your blog’s loading time and the design of your blog.

If you promote your articles on social media, make sure that your landing page does not take much time to load, or you might lose your new visitors. Design is another aspect of attracting visitors, and it’s best to go for a smooth and professional theme.

Recommended reading:

6. External site opens in a new Tab:

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Now that you understand what the term “bounce rate” means, you also understand how important it is for your visitors to stick to your site. These days almost all popular web browsers offer tabbed browsing, and it is important to take advantage of this by making all external website links open in a new tab instead of in your (current) tab.

A case study by Uxmoment, explains the science of opening sites in a new tab, and why this is important for your website.

In short, when you are linking to any site (Wiki, YouTube, or any other external site), select the option which says “open in a new tab”, as shown in the screenshot above.

7. Scannable and readable article

There are many bloggers who do not write concise, pointed articles. Dividing your blog posts/articles into parts (paragraphs that are separated by spaces) creates a good and easy user experience. 

If you do not divide your articles in parts, readers have more difficulty negotiating the article and can feel overwhelmed by the amount of unbroken text before them.  

Furthermore, other bloggers and visitors land on your article because they want information on that topic. They may not have time to spend reading line by line by line, so you want to offer them an easily skimmed article.

Here are tools that would help to improve your article:

Make your article scannable and easy to read for your visitors. Try to give a style to your headings (H2, H3, H4), and use them to make your content scannable. This will also help you to drive traffic via social media sites.

Showing related posts helps a lot, because once a reader is finished reading the article, he may want to read more about that  topic or a similar one. Think of yourself as a blog reader.  

What kind of action do you take after reading an article?

There are a few good related posts WordPress plugins to add related posts in WordPress.  This works out of the box and makes it easy to add related posts.

I like to place related posts after my posted information. Also, showing related posts with thumbnails or bullets has an extra advantage, as it increases CTR (click-through rate).

I would like to suggest that you start showing related posts based on categories and tags. More closely related posts will encourage more clicks.

Writing posts on topics related to your most viewed pages can make a significant difference to the success of your blog and can help you to increase a visitor’s time on your site

9. Easy navigation

Your blog should make it easy to navigate from one page to another. Visitors should not get confused about the blog’s navigation. If they don’t quickly find what they are looking for, they will surely leave the blog.

Make sure you enable the breadcrumbs, as it helps in better navigation, and user experience. Nonetheless, enabling breadcrumbs also helps in SEO, as mentioned in my WordPress SEO guide.

It’s always recommended to have a search box that is clearly visible. Visitors always prefer to search for articles. If you want to decrease your bounce rate, make sure that you link only relevant articles with each other. Irrelevant articles might irritate your visitors, and they will leave your blog if that is the case.

11. Internal linking:

This is one factor that helps a lot to let your readers remain on your website. Try to interlink your blog posts as much as possible. If you have seen Wikipedia’s SEO strategies, you know that they add lots of internal links within a page. This also helps in boosting your search engine ranking if you are linking using the anchor text technique.

If you are using WordPress, you can use LinkWhisper to interlink posts with your desired keywords.

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Read: Linkwhisper review

This is one highly recommended tip to decrease the bounce rate of any website. This will also help increase a visitor’s average time spent on your site and will cause readers to browse more internal pages.

Bounce rates show how many visitors like to read your blog articles and find your blog interesting. So make sure that you use the strategies described above to decrease the bounce rate of your website.

If you have additional tips to share, please do so using the comments section below.

If you find the information in this post useful, please share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

26 thoughts on “11 Proven Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate in 2024 (Tips That works)”

  1. Amrita Sen

    I just want to thank you for the post. After reading it and using the tips, my bounce rate definitely became better.
    Please let me know that how many interlinks can I have in one post. Thanks again.

  2. Varun Shrivastava

    As always, a very informative blog. These tips has actually worked on my blog. I managed to bring down the bounce rate of my website from 79% to somewhere around 54-64%.

    Often when bounce rate increases, people start to question the content of their website. However, most of the time content is not the reason rather bad optimization.

  3. Amjad Hussain

    Greate article . I m using “inline related post plugin” to insert related post within the post.

  4. Mickel

    Good post!

    But:

    How about how-to tutorial websites?

    My website has how-to tutorials for tech-related topics such as computer and internet use, smartphones and apps, burning and copying CDs and DVDs, converting and editing videos, and more.

    Most visitors come for solutions to their problems and then leave.

    Any tips for dealing with these kind of websites?

    1. Site has a “Related Posts” section.
    2. It’s using tags.
    3. My main menu has all the main categories included ( e.g Computers – Internet – Mobile – Gaming – Video – CD/DVD )
    4. There’s a search bar in the header and just above the title (like 100px above the title).
    5. Links to other websites open in a new tab (window).
    6. It’s easy to read with enough white space (no big blocks of content).
    7. Not many ads (only one below the first few paragraphs and one at the end of the content and both are horizontal responsive text ads, so not big at all.
    8. Website is responsive.
    9. Website loads fast (good scores with Pingdom tools, Google PageSpeed, and GTmetrix).
    10. Internal links to relevant pages.
    11. Nice, but simple design with no sidebar and no distractions.
    12. Using a nice image related to the topic at the top of each page which floats to the right with some margin, so that first 2 or 3 paragraphs are shorter and thus faster and easier to read.
    13. I’m using bucket brigades (copywriting trick learned from Brian Dean at backlinko).

    Do you know any other tips that I can use?

  5. Anuradha Chawla

    Once again a great article and yes my question comes in mind, StumbleUpon always creates a high bounce rate, what to do about that ?

    1. Varun Shrivastava

      Hi Anuradha,

      StumbleUpon is built for viral content. It has a really good potential to bring huge traffic to your website.

      As long as you are getting a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, you should be okay with that.

      Don’t get obsessed for Bounce Rate. It is not a direct ranking factor for google and it will never be.

      Work on your content and bounce rate will reduce.

  6. Shubhangi

    Hi Harsh,

    I am working on a website and everything is going good, we have good visitors, navigation,ranking, content is also unique but the bounce rate of few pages is either 0% or 100%. Specially Blog Pages have 0% rate. Please do reply.

  7. Chetan Gupta

    Hi Harsh

    It’s really a fact, Nowadays many bloggers are getting high bounce rates on their blog which is really a head ache for them.
    Due to high bounce rate, they aren’t able to generate sales. I am also one of them.

    Since last 4 months, I have been noticing that my blog is getting high bounce rate and my visitors are leaving my so frequently.
    They aren’t engaged with my content.

    So to solve this issue, I was doing research on it and searching for some best ways which I can implement to reduce bounce of my blog.
    While doing research, I have learn’t bellow points which can help to reduce bouce rate of the blog.

    1. Fresh & Helpful Content

    During the research, I was noticing few blog content and I found a big diffence in them.
    I have seen two blogs and one of them writing content just to sell their product and to drive traffic. The writer of that blog just writing articles based on keywords and their articles aren’t enough informative.

    On that blog, I only seen content which aren’t helpful to me.
    On the other side, the second blog is filled with awesome content.

    Articles on the second blog is completely eye catchy and even after reading their titles, I wasn’t able to resist myself from reading those articles. I read almost 4-5 articles there and they all are hub of helpful information.

    Difference which I noticed in between these two blogs is, 1st blog is only writing for sales and traffic But 2nd blog is writing just to help their readers.

    2nd blog was focusing on creating high quality content which can solve issue, which can create results.

    The writer of 2nd blog was giving brilliant solutions and writing in-depth articles.
    He was focusing on readership and building relationship with their readers.

    This was the big difference in these 2 blogs. & I learnt that content should be of such kind which can create results and solve issue. 😀

    2. Updating Old Articles

    2nd thing which I learnt is, Updating old articles.
    I have learnt If we will not update old articles with fresh information then there would be high chances, the reader will surely leave our blog because they might not be getting what they really want.

    So updating articles with fresh information would be a technique to hold them and engage them on our blog. Right? 😀

    3. Content Readability

    I myself never read those articles which have so long and thick paragraphs. I have seen some websites which writes so long and thick paragraphs which scare readers to read them.
    I also scare when I see such long paragraphs and I don’t read them.
    I always love to read short and clean paragraphs.

    So we should must improve our content readability so that readers can find it interesting and helpful. 😀

    There are also some other points like improving blog design etc etc But I can’t mention all of them in single comment. 😀

    Your article is really helpful to me and I learned so many points from you.
    Thanks Harsh for sharing such a great piece of content with us.
    Happy Blogging 😉

  8. Jesse

    Bounce rate is one of my biggest problem right now. There were ideas I did think to changes my blog but this article make me realize there are more I can consider. Thanks for great tips.

  9. Nisha Pandey

    Hello Harsh,

    My bounce rate is between 60-70%. Is it fine or I need to improve more better? Please reply.

    Thanks! Have a great day ahead!

    1. Varun Shrivastava

      Hi Nisha,

      Bounce rate is different for different niche websites.

      For most of the website, 60-70% bounce rate is considered good. So, pat on your back for the good work you have put in and continue doing it.

  10. Puneet

    Despite many people think that Content is king, but I believe that the design plays a more important role. If you can amaze visitors with your design

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Puneet
      More than a design, it should have clear and crisp navigation, which helps the most here.

  11. Annamalai Nagappan

    I agree with you.My website is new and i was looking for such kind of tips where one can decrease the bounce rate.I think if i follow all these tips definetly i will decrease my bounce rates.Thanks a lot.

  12. rakesh kumar

    The best tips for me was to open every external link in another tab and easy navigation of your collected information.

    1. elizabeth

      Hi Rakesh, I;ve been battling this question whether or not to open the links in new tab. I guess I would give it a shot since you have found success in doing so!

  13. Chankey Pathak

    I’m getting 7% bounce rate now. On an average it is 12% 🙂

  14. John Mak

    Harsh that’s an excellent informative article! My bounce rate is not that bad but I have to lower it! It’s the connection between the audience and the blog! Very important to know what’s going wrong… Thanks for sharing!
    John Mak

  15. Barzrul

    Bounce rate is one of my biggest problem right now. There were ideas I did think to changes my blog but this article make me realize there are more I can consider. Thanks for great tips.

  16. Samir

    The link-within widget and a very light theme seem to be working just fine for me. Though this blog is new and most of the visitors are first timers, they visit almost all of the pages!
    Searches haven’t quite worked out for me though.

  17. Shaswat Patel

    Thanks for such a excellent tips, as a Blogger I have to agree that Blog should needs related Post option which is best way to decrease your bounce rate. I have new blog and my Bounce rate is lower from 92% to 68% within few days and it daily going down.

    I would also agree on interlinking system, where we can redirect readers to particular page by giving link within post!

    Thanks for great tips.

  18. Ankit

    Agree with your landing page point, Landing page plays an important role in everything whether it is normal blogging or affiliate marketing. It is important! As landing page would be directing all your traffic.

  19. Tinh

    Internal linking is also a great way to reduce bounce rate. Try to link back as many as possible to our related posts or old posts that push readers to read them. This can also be good for ranking. That is my experiences, your suggestions are awesome too. Thanks

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Tinh
      That’s a great point as internal linking helps readers to discover more related content within the article itself.

  20. TechOfWeb

    me just dying hard to decrese my blogs bounce rate. Its right now 60%
    I wud say rather bounce rate is less tahn tech blogs and more of general news blog from my exp

    ATUL

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Atul
      You are right but if you strategically place your content using Categories, Tags and related posts, you are more likely to see less bounce rate.

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