To have a successful blog, you need to reduce your blogs “bounce rate” or you need to have more “page views”. Two of these terms are like the two sides of the same coin. If you can reduce the bounce rate of your blog, you are definitely going to have more and more page views.

So what is “Bounce Rate”? Bounce Rate is the ratio or percentage of visitors who return back or “bounce back” from a particular page on your site to some other website. Typically bounce rate is mainly centered around the search engine visitors. Suppose 100 visitor comes from the search engine to your blog, but 80 of them immediately returns back or “bounces back” to the search engine results page (SERP) back just by viewing a single page on your site. Then you are going to have 80% bounce rate, which is really poor.

So, we must reduce our blog’s bounce rate as much as possible. If we can take steps to reduce bounce rate, then the  page views will surely increase, and so will the avg. time on site. Thus we will have a much better and much more engaging blog, which should be our primary focus as a blogger.

So, here are the 15 quick tips, that you can follow to reduce your blogs bounce rate. I have tried to make these tips as short and simple as possible.

1) Good Quality Content -  This is the most important aspect in reducing bounce rate. If you don’t provide good quality content, visitors will have a tendency to leave your site. So try to provide the best possible content to your readers. Always remember, write for the readers, and not for search engines.

2) Clean Theme Design - You must have a clean theme design. You should not install each and every plugin out there and completely mess up your theme. Visitors generally tend to leave an ugly-looking site. So, try to find a simple and good-looking theme.

Read More: Minimalist WordPress Themes for Your Blog

Read Even More: WordPress Portfolio Themes to Showcase your Works

3) Speed Up Your Site - This is also very important. Try to have a faster loading blog. If it takes ages for a single page to load, then it is quite justified for your visitors to leave your blog. But in turn, if your site loads up faster, then visitors would love to view more and more pages, and thereby reduce bounce rate

Read More: 15 Ways to Speed Up WordPress And Reduce Page Load Time

4) Related Posts - It is very important to show your visitor ”what’s next?” After reading a good article, your visitors may want to read more, so its your duty to show them, some of the related posts at the bottom of each and every post. There are plenty of good plugins which use smart algorithms to detect recent posts. You can use any of them to help you out.

Read More: WordPress Related Posts Plugins for your Blog

5) Popular Posts- You can either use the sidebar or use the bottom section of every posts, to show the most popular posts on your blog. There are some posts that are liked by most of your visitors and have attracted many comments, so these are your blog’s most popular posts. Show these posts to the other visitors also, may be others will also like them.

6) Use Less Ads- Use as less ads as possible. There are some sites who just dump the entire website with ads. Even the posts are filled with ads, in between. So, reduce the no of ads you use. Do some good research on which spots to use for maximum visibility of ads. Remember, too many ads do not give you more money, but smart placement of ads does.

7) Don’t Irritate Visitors- Don’t irritate your visitors by showing them irritating popups every time a page loads. Or even if you show popups, do give options to close them if the visitors wants to. Also avoid Text Link ads, they really suck big time, I can tell you.

8) Proper Internal Linking- Interlinking is really very important. Try to do as much internal linking as possible. And of course, relevant internal linking. You can do this manually. But you can also use some plugin to help you in this job. I personally use SEO Smart Links, and its really cool. I would recommend my readers to try it.

9) Avoid Too Much External Linking- Don’t link to external websites anywhere and everywhere. Do it if is really demands for it. Suppose you want your visitors to see some cool information published on some other blog,then you should definitely do it. But don’t over do it, as it gives an ample scope for your visitors to leave your site. external links are like the gateways to leave your site, so provide as less as possible.

10) Length Of Posts- This is also very important. But its really difficult to determine. Some visitors like to read long articles, while some like short and sneaky posts. Some people really get irritated by seeing long articles, while some hate short posts. So it should be your take to decide what you want to do. Its a good idea to mix both of these types to satisfy all of your readers.

11) Find Pages With High Bounce Rate- You should work particularly on these pages. You can use your favourite Analytics program to find the posts where the bounce rate is very high. Work on these posts, update them with better content, remove unnecessary images or take any other necessary step to reduce these pages bounce rate.

12) Better Readability- Make the posts more readable. Don’t write in the form of long uninterrupted paragraphs, don’t make spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. These are real turn offs for any reader, and can make them leave your site immediately.

13) Break Long Pages- If a certain article is too long, then you can divide or break it into a number of pages. This trick will significantly increase your page views and thereby reduce bounce rate. Suppose you have a page with a very long content, and you break it into 5 pages, then you will have 5 page views instead of one.

14) Remove Autoplay Videos- This is a real turn off for any visitor. For me personally, I will leave any site immediately that has video’s and audio’s, that start playing automatically when a visitor lands on their their page. This really irritates any visitor, and can make then leave your site.

15) Place A Search box- Suppose a visitor lands on a certain page on your site, and loves reading it, now he/she wants to search for more good quality content written by you, but is unable to find a search bar anywhere. So, give them the chance to search for content in your site. Place a search bar on the top of your site.

I hope this tips will help you reduce your blog’s bounce rate, increase the number of page views and avg time on site spent by your visitors. If you have some more tips, that you think can help in reducing bounce, don’t hesitate to mention them in the comments section.