I was able to reduce the bounce rate of my blog — the percentage of visitors who arrive at the front page only to abandon the site after a second’s glance — from 75% to under 7% in less than a week.

Bloggers and website managers should keep a close eye on the bounce rate of their sites, the proportion of single-page visits which is easily monitored and clearly displayed by Google Analytics. This will show you in humbling detail just how many visitors are less than impressed by your Flash intro screens and wordy biographies before being allowed to read a single word of new content.

Google Analytics dashboard

The problem I faced for the first two months of this blog going online was theme of writing, or “occasional writing”, which meant the visitor could encounter entries of typically 500 words or more. That is the length of article I am comfortable with, and I didn’t want to change my writing style any more than necessary.

So how was I to make a reader’s visit more comfortable in not requiring them to scroll down a page of full-length posts, seemingly as far south as Australia? The solution was obviously to display excerpts instead of full posts, and the WordPress blogging platform enables one to display entries either in full or as one-paragraph excerpts.

However, I wanted to display my first post in full while reducing the remainder to excerpts, but it looked as if I was going to have to show either snippy excerpts, or a virtual parchment scroll of grey text. Then I happened upon the solution by way of a WordPress plugin called Homepage Excerpts.

This enabled me to display my latest entry in all its glory, followed by an enticing string of excerpts. I could even determine the number of posts displayed in full, which if set to ‘2′ gave me room for a permanent message or picture, followed by my lead post in full, and then my excerpts. I settled on a single post followed by 11 excerpts. And because I write my own excerpts instead of letting WordPress automatically grab the first 50 words, I avoid the problem of duplication and being penalised in terms of SEO.

On the subject of excerpts, I could see that few downpage titles were actually being clicked for the posts to be read in full. Then it dawned on me that the impact of the pictures I’d used in my full posts had been missing when displaying excerpts, even if the paragraph of sample text was as catchy as I could make it.

For every post containing a picture, I simply copy the picture’s html code and paste it into my excerpt, halving the size of the copied pic and keeping the text-to-picture ratio intact.

After a week of tinkering with the site structure while trying to add fresh content to keep the searchbots happy, I was delighted to return to Google Analytics to find that my overall bounce rate had dipped to around 7%, and in recent days in has been showing as low as 3%. Overall, the cumulative rate is 33% and falling.

WordPress devotees will have noticed that since first writing this post, I’ve restructured my blog around the Mimbo magazine theme which incorporates post excerpts and automatically resizes the lead image. However, these few simple tips should help bloggers with less flexible themes to encourage visitors to stay longer on their sites.

Tags: bounce rate, excerpts, Google Analytics, WordPress
Categories: blogging

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 7.23 am and is filed under blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.