How to Reduce Your Websites's Bounce Rate Quickly by 40% to 50%

What is bounce rate of website?

Bounce rate is no. of visitors who leave your website after visiting single page of your website and not interacting or visiting other pages. It is measured in % and lower the bounce rate, more the user satisfaction on your website. It is also known as exit rate.

Higher bounce rate won't affect much in your site's search rankings but it is effectively used for monitoring effectiveness of your website's landing page. Higher bounce rate means you are able to keep your users interested enough to view other pages of site and at the end it affects traffic to your website.


Bounce rate (%) = (100*No. Of visitors visiting only single page) / (Total no. Of visitors)

Reasons for which users leave your website:

1. User is satisfied with the content he landed and not much interested in other content of your website
2. Your site takes too much time too load or not responsive and does not load properly
3. There is no proper navigation on website and user is not able to find what he wants

These all things you should take care to lower the bounce rate. Please follow below tips to ensure user does not bounce keep visiting other pages of your website.

How to reduce or decrease bounce rate of website?

(1) Change Analytics code:
I have tweaked simple analytics code and I was able to decrease bounce rate from 70% to 34%.

Standard Analytics code:

<br /> <script> (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'Your_Tracking_Id', 'auto'); ga('send', 'pageview'); </script><br />

Tweaked analytics code to lower bounce rate:

<br /> <script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'Your_Tracking_Id']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); setTimeout(function() { window.onscroll = function() { window.onscroll = null; // Only track the event once _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'scroll', 'read']); } }, 5000); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); </script> <br />

Note: Replace Your_Tracking_Id with your tracking id which you will find in your google analytics account.

Standard Analytics code considers 1 page visitor as bounce but this new code will consider only the visitor who are leaving website within 5 seconds as bounce. Also if visitor scrolls down the page to read entire content then also that visit is not considered as bounce.

(2) Proper navigation, Responsive layout and Keep users interested

You can put links of popular posts of your website in the sidebar of website so users are encouraged to navigate there and view other pages. Also you can put statistics or some interesting eye catchy details on landing pages to keep user's interest intact to view other pages.

Now a days, many sites getting more than 50% of their traffic from mobiles, smartphones and tablets. So if your website is not responsive then its high chances that smartphone, tablet users will leave your site after seeing the single page. To avoid it, make your site responsive, user friendly so that it loads correctly in all platforms.

(3) Keep minimum ads-pop ups, Speed up page loading, No disturbing ads

Try to minimize the no. of ads on all webpages and specifically to landing pages so that users don’t get distracted and leave the website. Page load time also plays vital role in decreasing bounce rate because users tend to leave the website if page does not load in quick time.

Also make sure that external links open in new tab so that users can go back to your site by switching tabs to reduce bounce rate.


(4) Write relevant content, don’t copy-paste

Users should get what they want when they arrive to your website. When user searches something and lands on your page then he expects to get relevant content. So write rich content which provides value to users. Don’t have auto play content, poorly formatted content, cluttering of text and too much ads on your landing page to annoy users and get 
high bounce rate. 

(5) Get A Better Web Hosting account

Your website loading speed is mostly influenced by your web hosting server. You need to have a web hosting account on server with speed optimisation technology. You can get this speed optimisation technology through my favourite web hosting service provider Siteground.


Conclusion


When I was new in blogging, I didn't care much about bounce rate although it was 80%. Later I reducing it by ensuring above mentioned techniques and now I see no. of page views per user is increased and my total no. of page views per month too. (2,50,000 to 3,67,000)