In case you don’t know what bounce rate means, take a look at your website’s traffic stats via your Google analytics dashboard, then check the percentage of your bounce rate and see if you have a high or low bounce rate.

What Does A High Bounce Rate Mean?

For example, when a visitor comes to your site for a certain reason (news, information, or to make a purchase), and suddenly abandons your site (i.e. hit the back button). Google analytics counts it as a bounce rate.

Bounce rate could occur for the following reasons:

Slow loading website: if your website takes more than 5 seconds to load, your site visitors will leave.
Error 404: web page not found due to broken or dead links.
Poor or less valuable content: if your website content is not what your headline says, your website will hit the back button and leave to other blogs.
Confusing site: if your website is too busy with adverts or distracting pop-ups that block their vision, they will definitely leave.
No Clear call-to-action: if there is no clear call to action that tells your visitors what to do next, they will abandon your site.
Difficult checkout process: if you make your online shoppers jump through hoops just to make a buy, they will leave as well.

So all these situations were what my website experienced when I took a critical look at my Google analytics dashboard back in October 2012. I took action by seeking my friends’ opinions about my website outlook. This is what they said:

• I don’t really get what your website is all about (it’s confusing).
• What are you selling?
• It takes time to load from my smartphone.
• Your email pop up form is so annoying and distracting.

Their responses explained why my website’s bounce rate was so high each month from 70% – 100%. I had to do something about it.

Now here’s what I did to reduce my website’s bounce rate by 66%:

1.  Deleted all the irrelevant WordPress plugins on my blog.

2.  Installed the wp-cache plugin to make my website load faster.

3. Moved my blog posts from my home page – carolinewabara.com – to a separate blog page on my site – carolinewabara.com/blog.

4.  I created a separate home page that defined what I do and moved it to the front page.

5.  I installed the All-In-One SEO plugin to optimize my website’s title tags with local and relevant keywords.

6.  I changed my website’s description from “Digital Marketing with Caroline Wabara” to “Nigeria Full-Service Digital Marketing Agency”.

7.      I removed the email opt-in pop button and installed the static MailChimp opt-in form widget in my side bar.

8.      I installed a redirection WordPress plugin to reduce error 404 pages on my site.

9.      I included related posts carousel below each post to make my blog readers browse more engaging content.

10. I began writing valuable articles to inform, educate and entertain my readers.

11. I redesigned my website to make it more attractive and user-friendly.

The results:

Check it out in the images below:

October Bounce Rate was 78.57%:

November Bounce rate was reduced to 25.03%

Not bad isn’t it? Now your turn, how else do you reduce your website’s bounce rate? Tell us in the comment box below.