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Undoubtedly, it's annoying when you put a lot of effort into your website and face dwindling users' time spent on the website and high bounce rate. Even if your website attracts too much traffic, it still requires some work and experimentation to understand know how to encourage visitors to stay on your website longer.

Before we dive into the details, let us first take a look at the definition of Bounce Rate.

Bounce Rate is the measure of the % of visitors of your site that navigate away from the current web page without clicking on any other web page of your website. Lower bounce rate means that users are clicking on other posts of your website and vice-versa.

Now, let’s take a look at methods you can use to reduce the bounce rate percentage of your site:

Enhance User Experience

A difficult navigation system on your website can have bad effects on your visitors. Hence, a high bounce rate. Keeping the navigation simple is one of the ways to reduce the bounce rate. Below are some of the great ways to reduce the bounce rate and increase the user experience of your website.

1. Make long posts simple to read: These days, people hardly read what's inside the post. They skim through the blog, reading bullet points or the highlighted words. So, opt for large fonts, use the white space to break up text, and utilize small paragraphs that are easy to graze. Including bullet points is another way of making a content look good to the users.

2. Design easy navigation points: No one wants to search around a website to look for more content. So, design a search bar in your website with clear menu items. Also, use sidebars to give direction to the users toward the content they might be interested in.

3. Mobile Friendliness: With more than half a population of world using smartphones, it is important that you develop a WordPress website that is completely responsive to smartphones. If need be, seek the assistance of a professional developer.

4. Make your web pages more visible to the readers: In order to decrease the bounce rate, you must get the users to click on multiple posts on your website. When would anyone click on the post? Only when an important post is visible to the users. Another way is by internally linking a post throughout your content.

Enhance Page Load Times

A slow-loading website tends to lose visitors more frequently than a fast-loading website. Today, with the high-speed internet in the market, there is no excuse for a slow-loading site. A visitor clicking on your website would want to read the content within 3 or 4 seconds or else, he/she will leave.

First of all, check your website's speed on freely available online tools such as GTmetrixor Pingdom. Both the tools will show you the loading time of your website as well as the tips on improving your website's speed.

You can install various caching plugins available with WordPress like WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, or the premium plugin WP Rocket onto your website. Each one of these plugins will help you reduce the web server load time so that your website gets loaded faster.

Another way of increasing the website's speed is by upgrading the hosting provider of your site. A good hosting provider will ensure that your website never has downtime and loads quickly. Irrespective of the traffic on your website, a premium hosting provider ensure that you never lose visitors because of slow-loading time.

Compress Your Images

Reducing the strain on your server can help your web pages load faster. Not only will it reduce the bounce rate of your website, but also reduce its loading time.

You can use TinyPNG to compress the images on your website before uploading them to your server. The tool can strip the images of any surplus info and decrease the file size significantly. Not only does TinyPNG work with PNG files, but it can compress JPEG files, too. The end result is a compressed file that loads significantly faster.

There is another plugin called WP Smush that compresses images. The idea behind compressing images is to reduce load times so you avoid any loss of visitors brought on by prolonged load times. High-pixel images can increase the loading speed of your website, which will have negative effects on your website's traffic.

Create Good Content

A relatable and useful content is what most website visitors are looking for. A visitor landing on your website has definitely seen something attractive. Now, it all depends on you and how you follow through and give a visitor what he/she wants. Whether that be a special giveaway, entertainment, helpful tips, or a must-have product, it is your job to make them interested in exploring your website. Below are the few tips you can use:

• Use fitting keywords: Include strong keywords in your blog titles, sub headers and headers so that users looking for those keywords will find your site. Ensure that the keywords you use are related to your content. Otherwise, they'll just come and go away because they couldn't find what they were looking for. It'll ultimately increase the bounce rate for your website.

• Have a simple Call to Action: Making the visitors of your website's visitors engage in the content will inspire them to stick around your website. Not only they'll stay for a long time on your website but also they'll visit more pages available on your website. You can use quizzes, email subscription sign-ups, coupons or surveys to attract more and more visitors.

• Be attentive of SEO: You can use various plugins available for WordPress to increase traffic on the website. One of such popular plugins is Yoast SEO. It can take you to heights when it comes to SEO practices. There are plenty of things that Yoast SEO offers such as designating a focus keyword, editing the search result excerpt, and changing permalinks to be more user friendly and much more.

Conclusion

Nothing happens overnight. Reducing bounce rate is a consistent gradual process and only few strategies can make a difference. Adhere to the above steps and you'll definitely see a positive change in bounce rate. Good luck and kindly share your views in the comment section.

About The Author:

Kiera Hayes is a passionate Blogger and Web Developer. She enjoys reading and writing articles whenever she gets time from her work.

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