The web is rich with images and video, but it is primarily a textual medium dominated by the written word. The web is all about reading, and that means we have to pay attention to typography.
Typography concerns itself with all aspects of displaying text on a page, but the typeface is its fundamental building block and choosing a typeface is the first step in creating attractive and readable text.
Finding Fonts
Thanks to web fonts and font hosting services like Typekit and Google Fonts, we can choose any of thousands of fonts for our WordPress sites, but there is a price to be paid for all that choice — web fonts inflate the size of web pages and increase the time it takes for them to download.
We weren’t always given so much choice. In the early days of the web, designers could use only web-safe fonts: typefaces that were already installed on the majority of devices. That’s why Times New Roman, Arial, and Verdana were ubiquitous on the early web.
Introducing Web Fonts
Web fonts were introduced to overcome the limitations web-safe fonts. Fonts could be packaged up and added to a web page. Later, font hosting services made using web fonts even easier. And with free font hosting services like Google Fonts, there is no reason not to use web fonts.
But web fonts aren’t without critics. They have been vilified as unnecessary, overly large, and unjustified because users don’t care about them. Designers certainly care about the typefaces that appear on the pages they design, but it’s the rare user who will abandon a site for using a web-safe font. They do, however, abandon sites that take too long to load and render because of a huge font file.
The designer Adam Morse made this point forcefully in 2016 when he wrote:
Typography is not about aesthetics, it’s about serving the text … webfonts cause more problems than they solve and weren’t worth the cost to my users or myself.
There is some truth to this argument, but it’s not a view typographers are likely to endorse. Historically, web-safe fonts were poorly implemented copies of earlier typefaces: the Palatino system font is a bad copy of Hermann Zapf’s original work, and Microsoft’s Book Antiqua is an uninspired copy of that.
There is nothing unique, original, or inspiring about a web page set in Times New Roman, and although these are not things that the average web user is consciously concerned about, there is a felt difference between a site with carefully selected high-quality typography and a site with old-fashioned fonts that have been seen a million times before.
That said, today’s system fonts are far superior to their ancestors. Microsoft’s Segoe, Apple’s San Francisco, and Google’s Roboto are fine typefaces. A font stack that takes advantage of them is adequate if uninspired.
WordPress site owners should balance the time taken to load web fonts with their design and readability benefits to come to a decision that best reflects the goals of their site.
Every site owner should know about and track their bounce rate. As one of the core factors Google uses to analyze site quality, the lower your bounce rate, the better you’ll rank.
Luckily, there are some simple techniques for reducing bounce rate on your WordPress site. This article will look at how to find your bounce rate, how it racks up when compared to the rest of your industry, and what you should be doing to improve it.
What Is Bounce Rate?
Google states that “a bounce is a single-page session.” A bounce is when someone visitors your website and then clicks away without doing anything. The visitor may not leave the page immediately, but they don’t click a link to another page on the same site. In analytics applications, bounces are measured as zero-length visits because after the first page loads, there is no further interaction.
Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors that leave a WordPress site after viewing one page. A high bounce rate is not always a bad thing. If a landing page exists to collect email addresses, there may be no expectation that the visitor continues after submitting their contact details. Similarly, single-page websites may not have anywhere else for the visitor to go. While Google has stated that bounce rate isn’t one of the most important ranking signals, it does contribute to a site’s ranking. Moreover, for most lead generation and content sites, a high bounce rate indicates a problem.
Content sites that rely on advertising make more revenue when readers visit more pages. Business sites use content to attract customers, but the aim is to move visitors through a purchasing funnel that involves more than one page. Online stores expect shoppers to browse products across several pages and visit the checkout.
Reducing bounce rate is an important aspect of conversion rate optimization (CRO), and there are many tried-and-tested techniques for encouraging visitors to continue their visit after the first page.
How to Find Your Bounce Rate
Before you come to any conclusions, you’re going to want to find out what your bounce rate is. To do this, you’re going to want to use Google Analytics. If you haven’t set this up already, WPBeginner has a great article on getting started with WordPress and Google Analytics, or you can install a WordPress plugin to manage the process for you.
Once you’ve set up Analytics and collected enough data, you can then take a look at where you’re at. Start by opening your Google Analytics interface, and navigate to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages. This will show you which pages have the highest/lowest bounce rates.
A few other places you may want to check include:
Acquisition -> Channels -> Bounce Rate(See which channel has the highest bounce)
Acquisition -> Source/Medium -> Bounce Rate (See which sources have the highest bounce)
Acquisition -> AdWords -> Campaigns -> Bounce Rate (see how your AdWords campaigns are performing)
Bounce Rate by Industry
For most websites and industries, bounce rate hovers between 26% and 70%, with the average being closer to 50%.
According to data collected by CXL, the industry with the highest bounce rate is Food & Drink, closely followed by Science, and then by Reference. The lowest bounce rate was afforded to Real Estate, with Shopping, and then Games narrowly behind.
CXL’s numbers are a good guide for seeing how you compare to the rest of your industry. However, it’s important to remember that each industry has outliers. CXL mention that they removed 1% bounce sites from their sample (which did exist). Moreover, with over a 20% difference between the industries with the highest and lowest bounce rates, it’s important to understand that higher bounce rates are prevalent in certain industries. If you’ve managed lower regardless, well done!
How to Reduce Bounce Rates
Below are ten of our favorite tips to decrease bounce rate on your WordPress website.
1. Don’t Surprise Visitors
When a person clicks on a link to your WordPress site, they are acting on an intention. That intention is informed by information they receive about the content of the page, often from search results or social media posts.
If the content on the page doesn’t align with the intention of the visitor, they will leave. Misleading headlines, titles, and meta descriptions are a common cause of misunderstanding. Make sure that the metadata search engines and social media networks use to create snippets accurately reflects the content of the page.
Also make sure to check any additional site links that appear in search results. These will provide visitors with a great way to find the content they want quickly through search results.
2. Optimize For Content First
Before you can start with the nitty-gritty of bounce rate reduction, you’re going to need to take a long, hard look at your WordPress site’s content. What do you think? Have you chosen content that your audience will truly be interested in?
Content first strategies have long been a lynchpin in the digital marketing space for a reason: they work. Before you can hope to keep people on your website, you’re going to need to make sure that you have content that will keep them there.
A great way to optimize your content is to target long tail keywords. These are keywords that match user search queries. They tend to have lower traffic than short tail keywords, but they also target specific audiences. By targeting the right long tails, you’re able to attract more relevant visitors and so reduce your site’s bounce rate.
It’s important that your content as a whole, links up to create a content web – or at least is organized in such a way that many ‘webs’ exist. This is in direct reference to the halo effect – wherein a single piece of misdirected content can cause a cognitive bias against your website. According to one study by Edelman, 49% of buyers had a lowered opinion of a business after reading poor or inappropriate content.
3. Optimize Your Site’s Speed
Site speed isn’t only an important ranking factor, it’s also a great way to reduce bounce rate. If your site content is loading slowly, you’re going to have a lot of visitors turn away instantly. Improving site speed may be the fastest way to reduce bounce rate.
There are several ways to improve site speed. We’ve put together a list of simple optimizations for your website that anyone can do. These include compressing site elements and simplifying design. This will have the added advantage of improving user experience.
Another way to improve your site speed is to invest in a high-quality hosting provider. Pay attention to metrics such as full page load time and ignore TTFB. You’re going to want to find a host that is optimized for content to appear from the perspective of the visitor, not a machine.
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4. Avoid Pop-Ups
If the first thing you’re showing visitors is a pop-up, what do you think they’re more likely to do? Even if they do click that pop-up, they’re going to be navigating away from your site and you’re going to be losing that traffic anyway.
Yes, pop-ups do offer advantages, but they shouldn’t be everywhere. There have been several studies into what is called “Banner Blindness”. These studies have repeatedly shown that ads are often ignored, with some studies showing numbers as high as 93% of the time.
Small fonts can be a person’s worst nightmare. They may mean you can fit more on the page, but that doesn’t mean people are going to read it – especially if they’re having to squint.
Multiple tests have shown that websites that are easier to read and navigate have higher conversion and retention rates. This is especially true when it comes to the power of white space.
White space should be featured throughout your website, and accessibility is a great reason for making sure it’s there. It makes the content on the page easier to understand, improves user experience, and allows you to direct a visitor’s gaze to important content such as CTAs.
6. Design Matters
Have you ever clicked a link in Google and been taken to a site that looks like it was designed in 1998, that has tiny text or otherwise unpleasant typography, or that crams so much superfluous information onto a page that you can’t find what you are looking for? We know we have, and our reaction is to hit the back button and pick a different search result.
Content should be easy to find, easy to read, and easy on the eye.
7. Provide A Clear Route Forward
Visitors don’t waste time hunting for links: they have to be obvious. Each page on a site should contain a mix of links to other pages. These links should be organized in a way the visitor expects.
With few exceptions, web pages should provide discoverable and well-organized navigation menus. The page’s logo or main header should link to the home page. The site’s top-level architecture should be represented. For example, if you look at the top of this page, you will see links to our hosting services, our about page, and our help content.
Lead generation landing pages should have a clear call to action with a link that takes visitors where you want them to go.
Content pages should have a related content widget, so that users can find more content that interests them.
Content pages should also include internal links that take users to other parts of the site.
In addition to linking, it is a good idea to include a prominent search tool so that visitors can quickly find specific information.
8. Mobile-Friendly Design
Over half of Google searches are carried out on mobile devices. In the early days of the mobile web, users would put up with the frustrations of pinching and zooming around poorly optimized pages. That is no longer the case. If a site is poorly optimized for mobile screens, users will go elsewhere.
9. Minimize Interruptions
Users have long since lost patience with sites that display content-blocking modal popups as soon as they arrive. They come to your WordPress site for the content, and it’s better to let them see it immediately than to hide it behind a popup. Using popups and interstitials in the moments after a visitor arrives can also harm a site’s SEO on mobile devices.
Conclusion
The key takeaway here should be relevancy. It’s important that your content and experience are relevant to your site’s visitors. WordPress is a great tool for achieving this, by helping you to adopt a content first, targeted strategy.
Because of this, bounce rate reduction isn’t as hard as it may at first seem. It does, however, require a time investment. No one is going to reduce their bounce rate significantly overnight. The quickest way to improve site speed is to migrate to another hosting provider with a high-performance infrastructure. However, this will require a migration.
Overall, to reduce bounce rate on your WordPress site, ensure that users get the content they expect, that they get it immediately, that it’s readable and discoverable, and that there is an obvious route to other pages on the site.
Email is a powerful sales tool. It’s at least 40x more effective than social media, and has a much bigger reach than events. Because of this, it’s important that the emails your sending are done right.
Personalization ranks as one of the most critical email campaign factors. It draws the reader in, fosters a relationship, and encourages trust. Using a person’s name is a significant first step, but there are many ways to personalize an email and let a customer know that you care.
If your email campaigns aren’t bringing the results you want, perhaps it’s time you incorporated our six email personalization techniques. These methods will make your emails stand out from the others fighting for attention in a customer’s inbox.
1. Mention the Recipient Directly
“A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
The most well-used and well-known method of email personalization, and a perfect technique for building an initial connection. Imagine going to your favorite restaurant, but no one ever seems to remember you. It’s always a better experience when the head waiter recognizes you.
When it comes to digital, the data doesn’t lie. Using a customer’s name makes it more likely that they’ll journey further down the sales funnel and trust the research you present them with. Studies have shown that 63% of Millennials, 58% of Gen Xers, and 46% of Baby Boomers are more likely to click on emails that mentioned them by name.
However, resist the urge to pepper your entire email with their name. Too many mentions and the email will sound contrived. “Barry, this solutions is going to solve all your needs, Barry” – avoid sentences like this, you’ll push Barry away instead of drawing him closer.
2. Segment Your Email Lists
It’s unlikely that all your customers need to receive each and every email you send.
Stand out by only sending relevant emails to relevant parties. If you sell a variety of products, you don’t need to alert gizmo owners to a big sale for add-ons that only fit widgets. You only need to inform widget owners.
You can handle this process easily by segmenting your email list. A well-segmented email list is going to look different depending on your products, company, and customer base. However, at its core, it should seek to reflect a customer benefit analysis – I.e., what emails will most benefit what groups?
It would help if you also segmented your email lists based on where each person is on their buyer’s journey. Those who are just becoming aware that they have a problem that needs solving should receive a different email than those ready to purchase.
Creating a simple and easy to follow chart for customer progression is a great way to visualize how this segmentation process would work. We’ve put together a simple map to chart a buyer’s journey to cart abandonment.
3. Personalize Email Content
Personalization involves more than using a customer’s name.
A good example of a personalized email that uses more than a person’s name is one Open Table sent to restaurant diners that noted what the customers had recently ordered. By recognizing the buying history of a customer, Open Table implied that future visits would be better and more personalized.
Moreover, these emails helped to encourage and foster a community around the table booking service. Customers weren’t just finding a table, they were leaving reviews, building up a history, and contributing to something.
Emails that invite customers to be a part of something help to build trust and loyalty. For brands that rely on repeat purchases, emails that draw attention to community can lead to much higher customer retention rates.
4. Deliver Personalized Information
Don’t just deliver personalized product recommendations, deliver personalized information too. The buyer’s journey isn’t a single purchasing stage, it’s a model for funneling customers towards making a purchase. Before a customer makes it to the purchasing stage, they first weight up their options. This is where great, personalized content comes in.
Line up your website content with your email segments. Send those interested in tennis shoes articles about tennis shoes and those interested in bowler hats, articles on bowler hats. Contributing to a buyer’s consideration stage in this way doesn’t only help to improve retention, but can also lead to your becoming an influencer.
5. Use Location and Time
Everyone has a time of the day for checking their emails. It’s not always a time of day that you would have considered.
Busted Tees, a humorous tee shirt company, optimized their email campaigns by looking at the best times for sending emails and saw their click-through rate rise by 11%.
Email monitoring tools are useful for logging the open times for emails you send. Typically, a distinct pattern will emerge. Once you’ve learned your customer’s favorite email times, you can then send your emails at precisely that time – maybe even a little before.
6. A/B Test Content and Segment Techniques
For Busted Tees, the first step toward personalization was to segment its customers. The company grouped them by the time zone in which they lived.
Previously, all emails were sent at the same time — 10am EST. The new email segments aimed to target each customer at 10am, regardless of what time zone they were in. The company saw a significant email response rate increase.
They then tried different times of the day, to see if there were better times than 10am. A/B tests, where two variables are pitted against each other to determine the more effective way of doing something, were implemented and led to the discovery of several effective sending times. Overall, they managed to increase their response rate by 17%.
Conclusion
Email personalization best practices aren’t difficult to execute, but they do involve more than blasting generic greetings and cut-and-paste messages. It’s important to target your customers with content they care about.
A relevant email is more likely to draw attention, clicks, and ultimately purchases. By combining relevancy with testing, it won’t take long before you’re sending interesting email campaigns that promote your brand and help you to build a community.
Personalization takes a little extra work, but there’s a reason more successful marketers insist on doing it. It works.
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Making it easier to log in and check out is the most effective way to reduce cart abandonment. Social media logins allow shoppers to quickly log in using their social media accounts, reducing the amount of work shoppers have to do to buy your products.
Most eCommerce customers don’t use a password manager; they should, but they don’t. It is common for shoppers to forget passwords. WooCommerce provides password reset functionality for just this eventuality, but it’s a hassle and it introduces friction into the buying process.
Anything that makes it harder to shop hurts sales. Anything a WooCommerce store owner can do to make shopping easier increases sales. Social media logins remove the friction associated with authenticating on a WooCommerce store.
How do social media logins work?
Social media logins are a form of single sign-on (SSO). The user signs in on one domain, and that domain is used to authenticate them on other domains that implement single sign-on. You’re most likely to have come across social logins via sites that invite you to “Sign in with Facebook” or “Sign in with Google”, both of which run single sign-on services.
Single sign-on works by transferring an authentication token from the domain of the single sign-on provider. When the shopper arrives at a WooCommerce store, they choose which service they would like to use to sign in. They are redirected to the SSO provider’s domain, which sends the token that authenticates them on the WooCommerce store.
The shopper only has to remember one set of login details. Because they are almost certainly logged in on Facebook or Google already, the sign-in process is nearly instantaneous.
Adding social media logins to WooCommerce
There are several single sign-on plugins for WooCommerce, but Nextend Social Login is among the most popular. Once installed, the plugin integrates with a store’s existing log in interface. It supports many of the most common social platforms that provide an SSO service, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and VKontakte. A particularly useful feature is the ability to link existing WooCommerce accounts to social media accounts, so that all shoppers benefit from social media logins.
While social media logins are great for B2B retailers, enterprise and B2B customers may prefer to use SAML single sign-on, which can integrate with a business’s preferred identity provider. WooCommerce can quite easily be hooked up to a SAML SSO platform with the miniOrange SAML 2.0 Single Sign On (SSO) plugin, which provides SSO integration with major identity providers, including Google Apps, ADFS, Salesforce, Azure, IBM, Oracle, and many more.
Social media logins are easy to implement, so why not give shoppers the option to log in with their preferred social platform. Social media logins give shoppers a frustration-free experience and your store benefits from fewer cart abandonments.
WordPress is written in PHP, a programming language frequently used on the web. PHP code generates the HTML pages sent to a browser by querying the database to gather content and combine it with templates. From this, a final output is generated and displayed to users.
This is why WordPress is so powerful. In addition to being a content management system, WordPress is a framework: it provides functions and APIs that developers can use to build a website. In essence, a WordPress theme is a bundle of code that takes advantage of this framework.
Developing Themes with the Loop
One of the most important of the APIs provided by WordPress is The Loop. The Loop controls how content is displayed on a page. It’s used to display post listings, single posts, and pages.
It’s important to understand that a WordPress site doesn’t have only one loop. In fact, every major PHP file in a theme is a template file with a loop. This allows for WordPress developers to create unique page types that exploit their own Loop attributes.
The rest of a theme comprises CSS files and PHP files with functions that are imported into the template files.
There is quite a lot going on here, so we’ll explain in sections:
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
This line begins The Loop with an if statement that checks to see whether there are any posts to loop through. Then it begins a while loop, starting The Loop proper. The code between this line and the end of the while loop will be repeated for each post (which might only be one post, depending on which file this code appears in and the URL being accessed).
Adding Content to The Loop
In order to add content to a Loop, you need to mark it out using HTML with embedded PHP. You can add information like post titles, descriptions, content, dates, authors, and more. You can also include fixed repetitive content if you prefer a certain style.
This section contains HTML with an embedded PHP function for inserting the post title. In the code, this PHP function is called the_title, which is a template tag provided by WordPress.
Template tags are used to display information from the database. Here, the post title of the current post is inserted. The next few lines of code are similar, but the the_content template tag is used to insert the post’s content.
WordPress provides several hundred template tags, and themes are largely constructed from HTML, the output of template tags, and other PHP functions provided by WordPress or created by the developer. A typical WordPress template file is longer and more complex than this simple example, but works on the same principle.
To see The Loop in use, look inside your WordPress installation’s wp-content/themes directory. The following files are likely to include The Loop:
index.php is the base template file that is used as a fallback if a specific template file is not present.
home.php is the home page template. By default it lists the blog’s posts.
single.php is the template for individual blog posts.
There are several other templates that might be present.
With a basic understanding of The Loop, template files, and template tags, you should be able to make minor changes to your WordPress theme, but before you do, read this post that discusses how to create a child theme.
The web is rich with images and video, but it is primarily a textual medium dominated by the written word. The web is all about reading, and that means we have to pay attention to typography.
Hostdedi solutions offer high-performance and reliability. 
