As of today this site has a bounce rate of 75.35%. If you don’t know, bounce rate is the percentage of hits you get to your site that only visit a single page. It is usually used to tell how many quality visitors you have (so a high bounce rate is a bad thing), but for a site such as a blog I don’t really see a high bounce rate as such a bad thing. I know that when I visit a blog, in particular, I don’t want to see anything other than the first page on the site, I only want to see the new updates. I am not going to dig through a whole bunch of posts to find something because that is simply not what a blog is.

A blog is a frequently updated web site with many short posts on a variety of topics with tips, advice, ranting, or anything else. If you wanted information you would not be reading every post of a blog, you would go to Google or Wikipedia and search for the info you want. If you read a blog, it is because you are entertained, intrigued by, or interested in what the person is blogging about.

Don’t get me wrong though, blogs are great sources of information but what I am saying is that blogs, by nature (if full posts are displayed on the front page), will have a higher bounce rates than pages where you have to click through many pages to get the full story, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. What I think is more important is the time spent on your site per visit.

(By the way, I use Google Analytics to track site statistics with the Wordpress plugin Generic Stats (allows you to easily enter header and footer code that will stay functional even if you change your theme) and I haven’t come across anything that is better for free yet.)