5 Tips On How To Reduce Your Blog’s Bounce Rates

We already know that bad website design and poor content can deter your website’s visitors, but if you think that that’s all there is to it then think again. It may be hard to believe but apparently lots of website owners and bloggers, especially those who are new, still miss the other minor but important factors in making your visitors stay longer and return to your site.

Bounce rate, in layman’s terms, is basically the number of single visits in your site that results in the visitor spending only a short amount of time and then leaving immediately, hence the term ‘bounce’. You don’t want your visitors to bounce off of your site, so below is a list of tips on how you can minimize that from happening.

• Provide Easy Site Navigation – One thing that turns visitors off from a website is not knowing where and how to locate your site features. If your visitors have a hard time finding links to certain pages on your site, you can bet that the next thing they’ll look for is a way out of your site. Being forced to search for buttons or links just to go to another page on your site can be as frustrating as having to search for the TV remote just so you can change the channel.

• Minimize Ads – Do you know the feeling that you get when you have to sit through all those commercials just so you can watch your favorite TV show? That’s what it’s like for visitors when see all these ads and banners on your site: it overwhelms them. Having too many ads on a website is a turn off for visitors and therefore a no-no if you want them to stick around longer.

• Make Sure You Have A Search Box – Believe it or not, some blogs and websites actually don’t have a search box feature, which is another no-no because visitors do use it. It makes it easier for them to find what they’re looking for than clicking through a lengthy list of archive, labels, and categories.

• Improve Your Site’s Loading Speed – Nobody wants to be kept waiting, and that includes your site’s visitors. Don’t test their patience by making them wait for your whole site to finish loading. One common cause of slow page loads is having way too much widgets or plugins installed in your site. You could say that having too many widgets is almost as wrong as having too much ads on a website; one annoys the visitors while the other makes them wait.

• Interlink Your Blogs Posts – To put it simply, provide links to your other [older] posts somewhere inside your articles. The way to do this is by referencing a topic that you have previously written about, which will act like a “Related Posts” link from within your article. For example,  if you were to mention “increasing website security by using a PHP script,” on your article and you have already written an article on said script, you can hyperlink the phrase “using a PHP script” to that particular phrase.