Bounce Rate

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  cewinchester3 · Member · Nov 6, 2015 at 5:53 pm

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  I have a bounce rate in the region of 66%. It is a false reading because all of my posts are accessible from the homepage without ever clicking on one of them. So, somebody could read all my posts, then leave the site and it would be declared a “bounce”. How can I change this?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  jsase5 · Member · Nov 6, 2015 at 6:14 pm

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  Hey there @cewinchester3!

  In my opinion, the best thing to do to help your bounce rate would be to add the “More” tag to your posts.

  When you do this, your posts will be displayed on your home page as excerpts or previews. You can select how much of a post the reader sees, and then they will have to click “Read More” or something like that to read the rest of the post. They would then be redirected to another page for the full post.

  For instructions on how to do this, read this support doc on the “More” tag.

  Let me know if you have any more questions and I’d be glad to answer them!

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  cewinchester3 · Member · Nov 6, 2015 at 7:06 pm

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  Thanks Jsase5, I will use that in future.

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  auxclass · Member · Nov 6, 2015 at 7:25 pm

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  using the read more tag will make your front page easier to navigate because when you have full length articles they tend to run together and it is very hard to figure out where one Post starts and the next one stops – the more tag is easy to add so going back a ways would not be a large burden

  also the read more makes your front page load quicker –

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  cewinchester3 · Member · Nov 6, 2015 at 7:26 pm

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  Thanks auxclass, will use in future.

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  auxclass · Member · Nov 6, 2015 at 7:35 pm

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  You be welcome & good luck

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  timethief · Member · Nov 6, 2015 at 7:45 pm

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  What’s sent out to your subscribers is what’s in your RSS Feed for posts at this URL https://whysayanything.wordpress.com/feed/

  Although you can set your RSS Feed to summary, that setting here > Settings > Reading is only for the RSS Feed summary and does not affect the posts.

  When it comes to inserting “the more tag” AKA “the read more tag” into posts to shorten front page display be splitting text there is no universal setting for the whole blog. This is done post by post.

  If you want to display only excerpts on the front page of the blog followed by read more links, you can insert “the more tag” into each post prior to publication.
  http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/more-tag/

  The read more tag can be inserted once only into any post to change the front page or main page for posts display from full post to an excerpt. The split in the text does not display to you in preview mode but it will be there after the post is published.

  re: retired theme
  Also note that you are using and old retired theme and themes are retired when they no longer support all wordpress.COM features, so the recommendation is to switch to another newer theme. Note that these are this is a list of only SOME active themes on WordPress.com that use the excerpt instead of full post content. https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/theme-with-automatic-excerpts?replies=13#post-1396410