I Had a Huge Sudden Drop in Bounce Rate – The Cause

Today I try to solve the problem with a sudden drop in bounce rate on my website.

I noticed it a few days ago, but I was thinking that my content has reached the audience that is looking for just that content.

Well, I was wrong. It seems that my content is not so good. I did not point into readers’ pain points with the content.

Bounce Rate From Analytics

My usual bounce rate is around 80% which you can see on the image. I have extracted google analytics to show you what is happening. 

The bounce rate is really low and the drop was sudden. Just in two days the drop happened.

Simultaneously my number of pageviews increased which was the main cause of the sudden drop of bounce rate.

The problem seems to be in doubling page views every time visitors come to my site.

Each interaction with the page is counted as twice so there is no bouncing.

For some of you who do not understand what the bounce rate is, it is counted as 100% if you come to my website, read one page and leave my site. If you do not open any other page it means you have bounced 100%.

So the bouncing rate drop means that each visitor that landed to my page opened another page. Which is really hard to accomplish.

Even the best websites have some bounce rate which is not 0% or few % as I have now.

What is Causing Bounce Rate to Drop so Much

I have started to read what could cause sudden bounce rate drop and it is hard to find useful information.

There is a chrome widget called Tag Assistant which I have installed in chrome explorer to see if I have more than one google analytics tag that is checking page views.

And I have seen that I have two of them which is causing the problem with the bounce rate on my website. 

There are solutions to solve the issue, but most of them are about programming and reading the code on my wordpress website. That makes a problem because I am not so familiar with doing that.

So I read more about the problem and one thing was popping pretty often.

Some wordpress plugins could be the cause of the bounce rate drop.

But, the thing is that I do not remember installing plugins lately.

I have even contacted Siteground about this issue, because the problem started to appear at the same time when I moved from Bluehost to Siteground.

Their support politely sent me to someone who knows more about wordpress because they are not dealing with such requests.

So I have started to search for more information.

WordPress Plugin Is the Cause

Again I stumbled on the information about wordpress plugin, but now there was a forum where more customers have reported they have the same issue with suden bounce rate drop.

The problem they have is with a woocommerce plugin that has an additional tracking system from google analytics that is causing page views counted double and bounce rate to drop.

Well, I did not install such a plugin, but I had plugin cart flows and woocommerce.

After digging more around internet I have remembered that cart flows automatically installs woocommerce plugin that is causing problem to other visitors.

Then I have tried to remove woocommerce and to see if there is any change when using chrome plugin.

And there was no change.

Then I have removed cart flows from the wordpress and checked with chrome plugin.

Then the problem was removed. Double tracking was removed.

It seems that the plugin that is installed with cart flows somewhere has an additional tracking system.

I did not want to mess with it because at this moment I am not using cart flows so I have removed it completely.

After that I checked my bounce rate. And after a day my bounce rate with pageviews returned to the previous state.

The problem was solved :).

Who would tell me that that kind of thing could cause a problem with the bounce rate.

I am glad I have managed to solve this issue so I hope my blogging experience will help you also if you encounter the same issue.