I've Improved My Bounce Rate By Almost 80%

byShylaE

410 followers

5 years ago

Bounce Rate Struggles

When I started my blog a few years back I had no clue about any of this stuff, but I do know I had consistently high bounce rates and terrible session durations. My problem was not knowing my target audience.

Believe me, I wanted to know them. I just didn't have a super refined niche. I was a "mom blogger". I blogged about this and that...advice, recipes, and other random things. I thought I had a clue. I really didn't. I was wasting my own time making content that no one cared to read.

My bounce rate stayed at a high of 80% - 90% always and I never noticed a change. I talked to other bloggers who told me they had the same problem and not to worry....so I didn't.

Traffic Grew...Still Had A High Bounce Rate

So over the years, naturally my traffic grew from my social media efforts and organic traffic combined. My bounce rate was still hovering the 80% mark and I really never even payed much mind to it. I knew it was high, but I was getting traffic..so what!

Something Happened

My website was SO slow. It hit all of a sudden like a ton of bricks. Horrible page load times and Google wasn't too happy with that. I found that almost all of my URL's were registering as "bad" because of how slowly they loaded.

I Began Optimizing

I resized all of the images on my website, removed plugins and widgets that weren't necessary. I essentially took away ALL of the clutter. Then a light also switched on in my head that told me...what is my best content? What do people like to see from me?

I Interlinked All Of My Popular Content

I decided to also interlink all of my popular content on each post I made recently. I had always interlinked content, but putting super related content together was a HUGE benefit. In just one week of time after doing all this....BOOM my bounce rate went way down and session durations went way up!

Making Progress

I only have been able to really work on my blog in a serious manner for the last 4 months and things have really been progressing. Coming back to WA was a great stepping stone as well. I had been gone for a little while due to work and other things. I am hoping to make even more progress soon!

All the best,

-Shyla