Website optimization is necessary if you are serious about increasing conversion and making money. When it comes to website optimization, bounce rate is one of the factors which everyone considers. Bounce rate is the reflection of the number of people who are actually interested in your site overall. Even a 10% reduction in the Bounce rate may do wonders for your CTR and Average site on Time.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors, who leave the site after visiting exactly one page.
So, more the bounce rate, less is the profit you are making. There can be many factors which affect the bounce rate and most of those factors are different for different sites. But, there are some general factors, if you consider those factors and make changes accordingly, the bounce rate will be definitely decreased.


Internal linking is considered good for SEO as well as good for reducing the bounce rate. Internal linking gives you an opportunity to keep visitors busy on your site, it provides visitors a channel to navigate through your site. You can do internal linking in a lot of ways, either you can simply mention your posts inside the body of the posts or you can use following methods.

1. Related Posts Widget

Related posts widget is actually important for reducing the bounce rate, as people reading the current post might be interested in reading on similar topic. So by using related posts widget, visitors can easily find the content which they might find useful.
On WordPress, I suggest using n-relate plugin to show related posts.

2. Most Popular Posts Widget

Every blogger knows that there are only a few posts, that bring more than 75% of the total traffic to their site. So, it's good to place those posts in sidebar under most popular posts. You can use a plugin for this, or place them manually just by linking to those posts.
Make sure that you don't use too many posts in the above sidebar widgets. Use only top 5-8 posts.


According to a study in 2009, 40% visitors will abandon a web page, if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, if you have a slow website, indirectly you are losing money as well as visitors. Design and website loading speed are connected. You can have a good looking website as well as a fast website.

Also Read up on : How to Increase Google Page Speed Score

Using HTML5 and CSS3 makes your sites faster as well as good looking. If there is something that can be done using CSS instead of javascript, always use CSS. Also make sure, you are not using useless traffic stat plugins/scripts. Keep the HTTP requests least as possible.

You can also use these free CDN services to speed up your website.

• Subscribe/opt-in box
• Related posts
• Most popular posts
• Recent comments
• Categories/Labels
• Archives
• Social media links/widgets

External links do not have as large impact as internal links. Still if you use too much external links in posts, make them open in a new tab, so that you don't lose the active visitor on site.