How to Increase Pageviews and Reduce Bounce Rate in WordPress

Increasing pageviews and reducing bounce rate are two crucial goals for any website owner. After all, high bounce rates signal that visitors are not finding what they need on your site.

More pageviews show visitors are engaged and exploring your content.

In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll provide proven strategies to boost pageviews and lower bounce rates in WordPress.

Why Pageviews and Bounce Rates Matter

Pageviews refer to the number of pages viewed on your site. If your goal is to have visitors explore your content, then higher pageviews are better.

Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who enter your site and "bounce" away after viewing only one page. Lower bounce rates are ideal.

Optimizing these two metrics leads to:

• More ad revenue from increased pageviews
• Lower cost per conversion in paid ads
• Higher organic search rankings from reduced bounce rates
• More email subscribers, social followers, comments, and sales

Clearly, increasing pageviews and reducing bounce rate helps grow your business.

What is Considered a Good Bounce Rate?

What makes for a "good" bounce rate depends on your niche and content model. However, here are general benchmarks:

• Under 20%: Excellent
• 20-40%: Good
• 40-60%: Average
• 60-80%: Poor
• Over 80%: Unacceptable

Of course, you‘ll want to aim for bounce rates on the lower end of this scale.

We‘ll explore proven ways to do that next.

12 Ways to Increase Pageviews and Reduce Bounce Rates

Here are 12 powerful tactics to boost pageviews, lower bounce rate, and improve engagement.

1. Speed Up Your Site

Site speed greatly impacts bounce rate. Fast load times keep visitors on-page. Slow speeds cause them to click away.

Use a tool like Pingdom or GTmetrix to test your site speed. Aim for load times under 2 seconds.

Speed up WordPress sites by:

• Upgrading to a faster web host
• Enabling caching plugins like WP Rocket
• Compressing images with EWWW Image Optimizer
• Minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
• Using a CDN like Cloudflare
• Removing unnecessary plugins

Optimize speed on all devices, especially mobile. 53% of site traffic is mobile, where load times are even more crucial.

2. Improve Site Navigation

Unclear navigation causes visitors to feel lost. They‘ll quickly hit the back button instead of exploring your content.

Ensure your site navigation:

• Makes it easy to find pages and content
• Is organized logically and labeled clearly
• Has a simple IA (information architecture)
• Has consistent styling and placement

Also, keep primary navigation links under 10 items. Too many links overwhelm users.

3. Include Related Links

Related links connect your content and encourages on-site exploration.

For example, at the end of blog posts add relevant links within the content:

“For more tips on speeding up your site, see our guide to [caching in WordPress]”.

Use context-specific anchor text for each link instead of just URLs.

Relevant links show readers where to find more useful information. This reduces bounce rates as visitors click to new pages on your site.

4. Add an Internal Site Search

An internal search helps visitors instantly find what they need on your site.

Instead of a frustrating and fruitless browsing experience, they can search your content just like Google.

48% of users leave a site after failing to find what they were looking for. Site search reduces this “fail to find” bounce rate.

Install a WordPress search plugin like SearchWP or Algolia. They‘re more powerful than the default WordPress search.

5. Open Outbound Links in New Tabs

Links to external sites are great. But visitors clicking away causes higher bounce rates.

The fix? Open all outbound links in new tabs:

“We referenced Wikipedia’s [guide to bounce rates]”.

Now when users click external links, the new tab opens but your site stays open in the background.

Use target=”_blank” HTML attribute to do this automatically:

<a href=”http://wikipedia.org” target=”_blank”>Wikipedia</a>

6. Add Related Posts Sections

Related posts keep visitors reading by suggesting relevant content to view next.

Display them below blog posts, at the end of landing pages, on product pages, etc.

Dynamically relate posts by tags, categories, author, date, etc. Don’t just manually pick a few posts.

WordPress plugins like Related Post and YARPP handle this automatically.

Add popular posts sections too. These highlight your best content to engage readers further.

7. Make Content Easy to Read

Hard-to-read content hurts user experience. Visitors bounce instead of straining to consume content.

Formatting content for the web is vital for engagement and bounce rates.

Follow web formatting best practices like:

• Short paragraphs
• Good use of headers, bullets, bold text
• Conversational writing voice
• Meaningful subheadings
• Short sentences
• Relevant images
• Clear formatting on all devices

These techniques make content scannable for online readers.

8. Optimize for Mobile

With 53%+ mobile traffic, an unoptimized mobile experience causes massive bounce rates.

Make sure:

• Site loads fast on mobile
• Content is easy to read
• Navigation and menus work
• Visuals and videos resize
• Forms and CTAs are tappable

Also, use a responsive mobile-friendly WordPress theme. This automatically adapts site layouts for mobile.

Test your mobile UX with Google Mobile-Friendly test. Then debug issues causing high mobile bounce rates.

9. Reduce Popups or Use Better Ones

Obnoxious popups and overlays are one of the biggest causes of bounces.

A popup splashing a full-screen promo as soon as visitors arrive is a sure-fire way to get them to click away instantly.

Instead, use subtle on-site popups. For example:

• Exit intent popups when leaving site
• Scroll triggered popups after reading content
• Timed popups after being on site for X seconds

Smart popups like these reduce bounce rates while still generating leads and engagement.

Tools like OptinMonster make it easy to create popups that convert, not bounce.

10. Create a Useful 404 Page

When visitors land on a non-existent page, you get a high bounce. But a smart 404 page turns this around.

Include:

• A search bar to find relevant content
• Links to popular site pages
• A refreshingly humorous message
• Clear navigation options

This stops visitors from leaving your site after hitting a dead-end URL.

11. Optimize Sidebars

Sidebars cluttered with random widgets increase bounce rates. Unfocused sidebars distract from content.

Instead, make sidebars work harder by adding:

• Internal site search
• Table of contents to highlight in-post sections
• Related posts links
• Links to popular categories or tags
• Optin forms or offers to capture emails

Strategic sidebars guide visitors to more relevant places on your site.

12. Show Post Excerpts

Listing full blog posts on category or homepage bogs down page speed. Slow load times negatively impact bounce rates.

Use post excerpts instead of full posts. Excerpts only show a portion of post content.

Faster load times, plus visitors must click through to full posts. Two wins!

Enable excerpts in WordPress Reading Settings. Or manually add tag in posts to define excerpt length.

Final Tips to Reduce Bounce Rates

• Email newsletters bring visitors back after they’ve left
• Push notifications alert subscribed visitors of new content
• Analytics like Google Analytics reveal why visitors bounce
• A/B testing lets you optimize pages to improve engagement
• Exit surveys provide feedback on why visitors are bouncing

Engage visitors after they’ve left your site. This gives you a second chance to re-capture their attention and turn them into regular readers.

Conclusion

Lower bounce rates lead to higher pageviews and improved user experience.

Use the tips in this guide to reduce the percentage of visitors that enter your site and immediately leave.

Strive for "good" bounce rate benchmarks based on your industry. Add pageviews by guiding engaged visitors to related content on your site.

Optimizing both these key metrics results in a stickier website, more repeat traffic, lower cost per conversion, and ultimately greater success with your WordPress site.