5 ways to keep visitors on your website for longer

You might have heard of it before, it shows in your Google analytics: ’Bounce rate’.

But what is it? A ‘bounce’ occurs when someone visits your website and leaves without interacting further with your site. Your bounce rate shows you the percentage of your visitors who bounce off of your site. Basically, they’re not sticking around!

Why is this important?

A good bounce rate is good for SEO. It tells Google your website is worth your visitors’ time and contains quality content worth reading, which means you should rank higher in searches.

Now that you know why you’d want your visitors to stay on your website, let’s look at how you can achieve that:

Optimize your website

People have a short attention span, and not a lot of patience. If your website takes too long to load, they’ll just go away! Optimizing your website though, can take a lot of effort, and sometimes requires to be quite tech-savvy, so I’ll give you a few tips you can implement today without having to hire a developer:

• Optimize your images. I’ve seen it so many times. If you keep uploading big images onto your website and blog posts, it’ll make it incredibly slower. You don’t want that! Keep your images under 500ko, 200ko is even better. You can do that easily in Photoshop by going to Export > Save for Web, and playing with the quality and size settings. Additionally, if you’re on WordPress, you can download a plugin called ‘WPSmush’ who will take care of part of the job for you.
• Too many plugins or poor quality plugins. For those who like to DIY, and I get it, hiring a developer is not always an option, you want to focus on a few good plugins. Avoid downloading a new plugin for every small functionality you want to add to your website and look at the plugin’s statistics before downloading; reviews, number of downloads, and the last time it was updated. If it has good reviews, a high number of active downloads, and it was updated recently (meaning there’s good support, and it’s compatible with the latest version of WordPress), you’re most likely set up for success.

Write quality content

This one is a given, but if you write quality content, your visitors will stay longer on your site to binge on all of of your blogs.

Always open outbound links in a new tab

Another mistake I’ve seen being made plenty of times. If you send your visitors away, well, there’s a chance they won’t come back. To make it easier on your visitors to stay on your site, change the settings of outbound links to open in a new tab.

‘You might also like…’

Dedicate a section at the bottom of each blog post or products for other ones in the same category your visitor might like.

Internal links

In the same idea, creating internal links can make your visitors hang around for longer.

This can be as simple as linking to your blog posts or products or your home page, or sending visitors who ended up on your portfolio to your services, FAQ or contact page.

Optimized 404 error page

Yes, 404 errors are bad for SEO. You actually should avoid broken links at all costs. BUT in case that were to happen (think Pinterest pin linked to an old since then deleted post), you want to make the best out of it, and design your 404 error page strategically.

If you’re a blogger, this could be a search bar and a section showcasing your most popular blog posts. If you’re a service provider, this could be buttons linking to your services, portfolio and freebies pages, etc.

That’s it for me today! Was that helpful? Is there anything else you’d like to know? Let me know in the comments below!