14 Ways to Increase Visitor On-Page Time and Drop Your Bounce Rate
when was the last time you checked your WordPress website’s analytics? How about your site’s conversion rate? If the two pictures don’t quite sync up (e.g. you’re getting a lot of visitors, but sales are in a slump), then it’s time to figure out what’s going on with your website.
Let me ask you a few questions:
What was your website’s bounce rate this month?
Which pages experienced the highest exit rate?
How long do visitors stay on each page of your site, on average?
Analytics are a tricky thing. You may see a bunch of glowing green indicators telling you that page views are on the up and up or that you’ve got more new visitors than last month, but those numbers don’t mean much if you don’t dig deeper.
If you’ve got a high quantity of visitors coming to your site, but they’re jumping ship within a matter of seconds without engaging, there’s something wrong quality-wise. Today I want to discuss how your website’s content and design may be the source of the problem and offer a number of ways you can go about lifting your visitors’ on-page time and dropping your site’s bounce rate.
Why It’s Time to Revisit Your Site’s Content and Design
Imagine you had a brick-and-mortar shop and people were always walking by the front window, looking in, and then walking on by. Or, even worse, imagine that people were stepping inside your shop, taking a look around, and then immediately leaving. This is exactly what happens on your website every time it registers a bounce.
Visitors to your website should be excited to learn more about you and your business after catching that first glance. However, when they “bounce” off your site without taking any further steps into other pages or engaging with the elements on your site, then you’ve got a big problem.
When it comes to design, there are a lot of factors that may cause visitors to hightail it out of your site:
Are the stock photos too cheesy?
Is the typography difficult to read?
Are there too many pop-ups?
Do the colors stir up a negative emotion?
Are there too many steps in the conversion process?
Is the content irrelevant?
Are calls-to-action getting lost?
Is the menu too difficult to navigate?
Or is it something else?
While I can’t say exactly what may be the cause of your particular site’s pain, I can give you some guidelines to follow when assessing and fixing what’s wrong with it.
Increasing Your Visitors’ On-Page Time
While the time your visitors spend on the pages of your website isn’t the only statistic you need to keep an eye on, it’s a good indicator of their overall interest. And with more time spent on-page, more pages visited, and a lower bounce rate, it’s safe to assume that your visitors will be more likely to convert.
Here are some ways to drive this engagement.
Tell a Story
Every website should tell a story. And by “story,” I mean there should be a clear problem-and-resolution that visitors notice when looking through your site.
If you’re not sure what story your website tells (or if it even has one), it may be time to rethink your website’s design and content for a stronger, more cohesive message that captures your audience’s attention.
Revamp Your Menu
If you find that your visitors commonly deviate from the pre-determined path you’ve established for them, then your navigation may not be as straight-forward as you think.
If there is related content that visitors are missing out on, a redo of your site’s navigation might not be such a bad idea. It would also give you an opportunity to better clearly tell your story by placing pages in a logical order within the menu.
Remove the Clutter
There’s a tendency in this day and age to overshare – to tweet our thoughts, Instagram our meals, Snapchat our adventures. When it comes to websites, though, think of them like the 140-character restriction on Twitter. Say as much as possible in as little space as you can.
This is why minimalist design is hot right now; it forces visitors to focus on the most important parts of the site and not get distracted by the rest.
Optimize Your Imagery
Images are an essential part of web design. They establish a tone, set the pace, and can even tell visitors a lot about a business. When talking about “optimizing” images, the first thing that comes to mind for developers is photo compression. Optimization can also pertain to making the most of the images used. High-resolution imagery is a must. Unique stock photography is good, too. Even better would be using your own photography.
Solution: Optimize Your Photos
Give Your Fonts a Facelift
A lot of consideration goes into the images, colors, and placement of a website, but what about the font? If you’ve ever relied on the default font selection of a theme, you know that those choices aren’t always ideal.
While there may be other issues giving visitors a difficult time reading your content, a quick switcheroo may be enough to hold their attention.
Solution: Upgrade Your Font
Break Up Content
The key to appealing to the masses is to go with a simple and classic solution. In terms of content, consider breaking it up in the following ways:
Use shorter sentences.
Keep paragraphs brief.
Add bulleted lists.
Create numbered points.
Use a larger font and header tags for easier scanning of content.
Rely on simple words and avoid industry jargon.
Solution: Simply Revise Your Content
Personalize Your CTAs
You may not realize it, but your calls-to-action (CTAs) may be standing in your way. It might be because the wording seems too much like a robotic command (like “Read More” or “Click Here”). Or it might be due to the colors, placement, or size of the button. Regardless, if you’re not getting as many clicks as you’d like, you need a way to better manipulate an urgent, emotional need to click.
Websites go stale very easily if left alone for too long. That’s why it’s important to blog, blog, blog—and make sure that the ongoing push of new content through the pipeline is relevant and useful for visitors.
The goal then is to create regular blog content that drives readers to stay on the page until they get to the very end. That’s where they’ll find your helpful suggestions to take an action or read other related content.
Solution: Share Related Content with Ease
Employ Interactivity
Flat, minimal design is good… but that doesn’t mean that animations and other forms of entertainment or interactivity are bad. In fact, they may do a better job at holding your visitors’ attention and propelling them through your site.
Sliding animations, creative calculators, and infographics can break up page-after-page of copy and give visitors a reason to stay engaged.
Solution: Make It Interactive
Check Out Your Pop-Up Usage
Our Hustle email opt-in plugin makes setting up effective and intelligent pop-ups super easy.
Luckily for us, exit-intent technology is alive and thriving and can save many a visitor from abandoning a site without at least giving up an email. That being said, some websites have gone a little overboard with their pop-up messaging, rendering the exit-prompted pop-up useless.
So if you choose to go the route of pop-ups, ensure that they’re used in the right place and the right time.
Solution: Make Your Pop-Ups Count
Simplify Your Conversion Process
For those of you who aren’t experiencing issues with bounce rate, but are still dealing with a lack of conversions, your shopping cart or intake forms may be the problem.
If there’s anything to learn from the tips above, it’s that your visitors expect a simplified experience. This may mean you need to cut down on the number of fields in a form or break your shopping cart out into multiple pages to make it more easily digestible.
Solution: Start with Your Forms
Add a Live Chat
For some visitors, the reason they leave is due to pure frustration. They can’t find the answer to their question. They can’t get a form to work. Or they’re experiencing some other issue that they want a real-time resolution for.
By putting a live chat module on your site, you can make sure you’ve got someone there to answer questions and keep visitors from unnecessarily jumping ship.
Solution: Have a Chat
Fix Broken Links
This might seem like a silly suggestion, but broken links are really disruptive to the visitor experience (and are bad for SEO, to boot). Rather than run the risk of annoying a visitor with one too many broken links, keep them moving through the endless chain of pages with intact links.
Solution: Fix Your Links
Find a New Theme
Spirit is just one of our stunning WordPress themes. Hit “Themes” in the navigation at the top of the page to check out our other themes.
If it’s been over two years since you last touched your site’s design, that’s a pretty good sign that it’s in need of a change. It also may be the case that the theme originally chosen just doesn’t work for your particular audience. People these days expect businesses to stay in tune with modern trends—and this includes design. So if you’ve tested everything else and are still struggling with getting that time on-page up or bounce rate down, it may be time to consider a new theme.
Solution: Discover a New Look
Wrapping Up
Before making any changes to your site’s content or design, make sure you have the following tools set up and ready to go. They’ll help you diagnose any initial issues and give you a decent place to start from.
Google Analytics: This is the best tool to have on your side when trying to figure out what’s going on in the minds of your visitors.
Responsive Check: Mobile usage has overtaken desktop, so it’s no longer a question as to whether your site needs to be responsive. If anything is amiss, you can use any number of responsive or mobile-friendly checkers to verify that your site is in good standing.
SmartCrawl: While search engine-optimized content helps search engines point people to your site in the first place, tools like our SmartCrawl plugin also help optimize the content on your site for improved readability.
Readability Assessment: If people are having a hard time reading the content on your site, the Hemingway App will give you a gentle nudge in the right direction.
A/B Testing: Hold onto A/B testing until you have some likely theories about what’s going on with your site. You’ll then be able to present some alternate versions of your site’s content to verify whether those theories are valid.
Remember: you want to drop that bounce rate and get that on-page time up. That doesn’t mean you need to completely redo your website in order for visitors to be more likely to convert. Your goal should be to identify those smaller areas that, when fixed, will make a huge difference in the reception of your site.
How to Show Different Menus to Different WordPress User Roles
IF you’ve already taken the time to nail down the perfect navigation for your WordPress site, the next thing on your todo list should be working out how much of your website’s menu should be visible to your site’s visitors.
For many websites, there probably isn’t much need to customize navigation. However, if you happen to run a website with multiple user types and access privileges, menu customization is a must.
Here are some of the reasons you may want to do this:
You offer members-only access to certain pages, content, and personal profile pages.
You accept guest posts and want to give them an easy way to log in without having to show a Login button to other visitors.
You have multiple user types that visit your website and you need to restrict access to certain parts of the navigation based on the role they play (i.e. administrator, editor, contributor, customer, etc.)
You run a forum or other discussion board and want to give logged-in users access to the private discussion area.
You want to include a registration link only to users who are not logged in or otherwise have access to your website.
If you’re looking for some simple tools and pointers on how to hide or show different parts of your WordPress menu to certain individuals, keep reading.
Plugins to Create WordPress Menus for Specific User Roles
Since plugins will play a crucial role in this process, let’s start there:
Add New Users Plugin
Make sure to start with the Add New Users plugin. This will give you the ability to add new users and define their role and access privileges on the site. It lets you add up to 15 users at a time and you can set the username, email, and password for each user easily. It works with WordPress multisite and BuddyPress, too.
Add New Users is available for free with a WPMU DEV membership.
With Custom Sidebars you can create as many sidebar configurations for your site as needed – for first-time visitors or members, for specific pages on your site, for special landing pages, you name it – and trigger them to display as needed.
Here are a few examples of how you could use Custom Sidebars:
If you run a blog that features reviews, opinions or tutorials, you could trigger a custom sidebar for each category that best reflects and supports the topic.
Share a calendar, promotional code or special offer with logged in users, based on their WordPress user role.
If you run an e-Commerce site, display a product list or list of featured articles.
Display advertisements only to users who aren’t logged into your site.
And here is what you can control in the backend of the free version of the plugin:
Sidebars for all the posts that belong to a category
Sidebars for all the posts that belong to a post-type
Sidebars for archives (by category, post-type, author, tag)
Here is another plugin that will allow you to manage user roles and access. The main difference with this one is that you can create new, custom roles for your site, rather than rely on WordPress’ standard ones. You can also change standard role names to give users a more personalized and brand-related experience.
This next plugin isn’t anything super fancy, but it will provide you with easy control over which pages or links to hide or show within your site’s menu. You’ll be able to restrict menu access based on the following high-level identifiers: Logged In Users, Logged Out Users, Everyone. If you choose the Logged In Users option, you can also restrict access based on specific roles.
These next two plugins are related to one another and are going to sound similar, but they’ll help you accomplish two different goals.
For the Pages by User Role plugin, it will help you do just that: restrict users’ access to different pages, posts, and post types on your website. This means that the pages will not show up in your menu nor will they show up in search if a restricted user tries to access them. So, if you’re looking for more control over the individual pieces of your website, take a look at this plugin.
Now, for the developer that wants to focus on the menu build itself rather than on specific page access, this is the plugin for you. With this one, you can create a menu that is available to the general public, a menu for logged-in users, and a menu for each of the different user types who have access to your site.
The If Menu plugin will give your menus added flexibility in how you restrict user access. For instance, you can define extra conditions outside of user state (logged in vs. not logged in). You can combine conditions related to user role, page types, device types, and more. So if you have a reason to get more granular in defining access rules, check out this plugin.
Step-by-Step: Creating WordPress Menus for Specific User Roles
Once you’ve selected the plugin you want to use, it’s time to get started in setting up those menu customizations. Refer to the following checklist if you have any questions on how to do this:
Step 1: In WordPress, go to the Appearance tab and click on Menus. Make sure you’ve set up all of the menus and pages/links you want to include in your site’s navigation.
Remember: you don’t have to create a separate menu for each user role or state, unless you want to. This may make sense if you’re going to present a completely different menu to logged-in users versus logged-out users. However, if you only need to hide a login or register button, or you want to make some other minor change, you’ll be best off just creating one universal menu.
Step 2: Download and activate the plugin you plan to use, if you haven’t done so already.
Step 3: Go to the Users tab and click on All Users. Before making any changes to access, ensure that you’ve clearly defined each of your users’ roles within WordPress.
Step 4: Go back to the Menus page. Review each page or link and set the appropriate user restrictions and roles. If you’re using the Menu by User Role plugin, you’ll only need to define which users have access to each menu.
Step 5: Keep in mind that if there are child menu items tucked beneath a page that you plan on hiding from someone, these will also be hidden from view too. So if you don’t want to keep users from accessing those pages, move those child menu pages out onto the top level so they don’t unintentionally get hidden.
Step 6: Once all of these changes have been completed, you’ll want to go through your site to confirm that all the correct links appear.
Test 1: Visit the site as someone who is logged out or does not have special user access to it otherwise.
Test 2: Visit the website and log in. Then view how it has changed.
Test 3: Repeat test #2 for each of the different user roles or conditional restrictions you have put in place.
Once you’ve verified that each user’s menu view is correct, get ready to start inviting others to sign up or join!
Wrapping Up
So there you have it. Six easy-to-use plugins and six simple steps to give you better control over how you create WordPress menus for specific user roles. Not too bad, right?
If you have more than one type of user, why have one-size-fits-all menus? Tailoring menus for each of your users is a must, especially if you run a membership site. First-time visitors to your site don’t necessarily need to see the same content in your sidebars as regular visitors. Likewise, it makes sense to display different information (or widgets) to users who are logged into your site (such as account details), as opposed to users who are logged out.
