12 Ways to Increase User Engagement on Your Website

Every visitor to your website took work to earn, whether that work was writing, SEO or paid ads. So it stings when a visitor reads a line or two and leaves without clicking anything.

Each of those quick exits is a visitor who might have subscribed, bought something or come back next week. Engaged visitors are the ones who actually do those things.

Fast pages and content that answers the reader’s question keep visitors reading, and Google’s ranking systems are built to reward both.

Below, we cover 12 practical ways to increase user engagement on your website. We also show you how to tell which pages need the work first, and whether each change helped.

In This Article:

What User Engagement Means in Google Analytics

Google Analytics measures engagement with a few specific numbers, and each tip below moves at least one of them.

User engagement describes how actively visitors use your site. It covers how long they stay focused on a page, what they click and whether they go on to a second page.

Google Analytics measures user engagement as “the amount of time someone spends with your web page in focus or app screen in the foreground.”

Google Analytics counts a session as engaged when it lasts longer than 10 seconds, includes a key event, or has at least two page or screen views. The 10 seconds is a default you can change. Engagement rate is the share of sessions that were engaged.

Bounce rate is the share of sessions that weren’t engaged. It isn’t in the default Google Analytics reports, but you can add it. We show you how to find your bounce rate in Google Analytics step by step.

We cover the full set of numbers, and where each one lives, in our rundown of the user engagement metrics worth tracking in Google Analytics.

Engagement numbers are most useful page by page. The tips below pay off first on the pages with the lowest engagement rate.

12 Ways to Increase User Engagement on Your Website

The first eight tips improve website engagement through the content and on-page features that hold attention once someone arrives. Tips 9 to 12 cover mobile reading, clear next steps, conversation and return visits.

In the table below, we pair each tip with the problem it helps with and the number to check once you’ve made the change.

You don’t need all 12 at once. Starting with the tip that matches the problem on your weakest page keeps the work focused, and the last column tells you which number to check afterward.

1. Write Content That Fully Answers the Question

Content that fully answers the reader’s question does more for engagement than any widget or popup. Every other tip here depends on people wanting to stay. It also helps in search, because Google’s ranking systems are designed to prioritize helpful, people-first content.

You can get people to a page by optimizing it to the fullest. But if the content isn’t what they came for, the danger is that they’ll leave before reading past the first screen.

Content that keeps readers on the page does four things well:

1. Answers questions thoroughly: It covers the questions readers are likely to have about the topic.
2. Reads cleanly: It’s free of grammatical errors and awkward phrasing.
3. Is easy to scan: It uses clear headings, short paragraphs and bullet lists.
4. Stays current: It gets refreshed regularly so the information stays accurate.

A content audit tool can flag older pages that have slipped out of date. For the writing itself, All in One SEO (AIOSEO) has a helpful set of SEO copywriting tips for crafting content that converts.

After you update a page, watch whether its engagement rate climbs over the next few weeks. That’s the sign the rewrite gave visitors what they came for.

2. Target the Right Audience

Before you choose a topic to write about, think critically about whether it will bring in the right kind of visitors. Write about topics that matter to the people you want to reach. Otherwise, visitors have no reason to open a second page.

To target the right audience, do some keyword research and check that the search intent fits your focus keyword.

Search your keyword and look at the top results. Then ask yourself, “What is the searcher really looking for here?”

If most of the top results are beginner’s guides, that’s a strong clue about what searchers expect. A very different format risks being skipped.

Once the right readers are arriving, the page’s engagement rate is your check. A page that ranks but loses most of its visitors may be answering a different question than the one people searched.

3. Make Your Website Fast and Error-Free

Slow pages cost you visitors before they read a word. The BBC found it lost an additional 10% of users for every extra second its site took to load, according to Google’s web.dev article on why speed matters.

Speed also matters in search, because Google’s ranking systems use Core Web Vitals.

Our guide to speeding up your WordPress site goes into each fix in detail. These are the key steps to improve performance:

• Test your site speed on both desktop and mobile
• Optimize images by compressing them without losing quality
• Use browser caching to speed up return visits
• Regularly check for and fix 404 errors and broken links
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) to improve loading times globally

Errors cost you visitors too. A broken link or a 404 page is a dead end, and the risk is that a visitor who hits one won’t try a second click.

If your site runs on WordPress, the MonsterInsights analytics plugin can run the speed test for you. Its Site Speed report (Insights » Reports » Site Speed, on the Plus plan and above) runs a Google speed audit for mobile or desktop.

The report gives you an overall score, individual metrics like Largest Contentful Paint, and a How to Improve list of what to fix. After each fix, click Run Audit to test again and confirm the score moved.

We walk through the whole check in our guide to testing your website speed in WordPress.

4. Ask Visitors for Feedback

Asking visitors what they need is a direct way to learn why they leave. A short on-site survey makes that easy.

With a survey and feedback tool like UserFeedback, you can ask visitors questions that help you improve your site and your content. A survey appears as a small widget at the edge of the page, so visitors can answer without leaving what they’re reading.

With a targeted survey, you can find out:

• What topics readers want to see on your blog
• Whether your pricing page is confusing
• How readers would rate your content
• What improvements would make their visit better

The answers tell you which page to fix and which tip to try next. If you’re not sure what to ask, UserFeedback has a guide full of customer survey question ideas.

5. Add Exit-Intent Popups

Exit-intent popups appear when a visitor’s behavior signals they’re about to leave. On desktop, that can be moving the cursor toward the browser tabs. On mobile, it can be scrolling back up.

The popup offers the visitor a reason to stay or come back. If you run an eCommerce site, you could offer a coupon. If you run a blog, you could invite readers to join your email list or offer a downloadable guide.

Here’s an example from an online store that offers a discount in exchange for a newsletter sign-up.

Exit-intent popups work well for:

• Offering discount codes on eCommerce sites
• Promoting newsletter signups with a lead magnet
• Suggesting related content the visitor might like
• Collecting feedback about why they’re leaving

Tools like OptinMonster’s exit-intent feature can add these popups to a WordPress site. To tell whether a popup is helping, compare its sign-ups with the number of visitors who saw it.

6. Add Live Chat

A live chat window lets visitors get an answer the moment they can’t find something. That gives them less reason to give up and leave.

LiveChat is one option for adding a chat window to your site, and it’s also useful for generating leads. You can compare its plans and start a trial from the LiveChat homepage.

LiveChat’s reports help you highlight customer pain points and areas to improve. You can also measure chat duration, queued customers and your agents’ response times.

Your chat history doubles as your check. If the same question keeps coming up, the page it comes from needs to answer it. We compare more live chat plugins for WordPress in our roundup.

7. Add Related Internal Links and Popular Posts

Internal links give visitors a logical path from one page to the next, and that path can turn a single visit into several.

Internal links work best where they fit naturally, and too many can make a page look cluttered. Our guide to adding internal links in WordPress covers how to strike that balance.

These placements help internal linking do more of the work:

• Link to relevant content naturally within your text
• Add “related posts” sections at the end of articles
• Include popular post widgets in your sidebar or footer
• Create resource pages that curate your best content on specific topics

Popular post lists are especially useful, because they point new visitors to the content other readers already responded to.

MonsterInsights’ Popular Posts feature (Plus plan and above) adds these lists inside your posts or as a sidebar widget, with 20+ themes to match your design. On the Plus plan, lists sort by comments, share counts or posts you pick by hand. Adding your top posts from Google Analytics automatically needs the Pro plan.

A popular posts list can sit in the sidebar right next to the article, as in the layout below.

We walk through setting up a popular posts list in a separate tutorial. Your check afterward is pages per visit. If it climbs on the pages where you added links, visitors are following them.

8. Add Videos to Your Pages

Adding a video to a page can hold a visitor’s attention where text alone might lose it. A video can also explain a step that’s hard to follow in writing.

Videos can help engagement by:

• Breaking up text and adding visual variety
• Explaining complex concepts more clearly than text alone
• Giving visitors who’d rather watch than read another way to follow along
• Potentially adding to engagement time while people watch

To show up in Google’s video results, a video needs its own page where the video is the main content. To tell whether visitors actually watch, look at plays and how much of each video they get through.

9. Make Your Pages Easy to Read and Navigate on Mobile

A page that’s hard to read on a phone gives mobile visitors an easy reason to leave, even when the content is exactly what they wanted.

Mobile readers see a narrow screen and tap with a thumb. Small text and cramped links get in their way.

These changes make a page easier to use on a small screen:

• A scannable layout, with short paragraphs, descriptive subheadings and plenty of white space
• A readable font size, so no one has to pinch and zoom
• Tap-friendly navigation, with menu items and buttons spaced far enough apart to hit with a thumb
• On-site search, so visitors can find a topic without digging through menus

Speed counts on mobile too. Google’s Core Web Vitals measure how quickly a page loads, how fast it responds and how stable its layout stays.

If you add a search box, site search tracking in Google Analytics shows you what visitors look for. After a mobile cleanup, watch whether your average scroll depth rises.

10. Give Every Page a Clear Next Step

A reader who reaches the end of a page with no obvious next step may simply leave. A clear next step can turn one page view into two, which adds to both time on site and pages per visit.

Three kinds of next step are worth trying:

• An in-content call to action that fits what the reader just learned, such as a related guide or a free download
• A related reading link near the end of the article
• A single primary action per page, so visitors aren’t choosing between five buttons

The strongest next step follows from what the reader just finished. A post on growing an email list, for example, leads naturally to a guide on writing welcome emails.

To see whether readers take that step, you can track link and button clicks in WordPress.

11. Invite Comments and Conversation

Comments engage website visitors by turning a one-way article into a conversation. That gives readers a reason to come back and see who replied.

Ending a post with a specific question gives readers something concrete to respond to. Replying to comments shows new readers that someone is listening.

Quick polls work in a similar way. A single-question WordPress poll takes seconds to answer and can show readers how everyone else voted.

To check the effect, watch whether comment counts rise on the posts where you asked a question, and whether those readers come back.

12. Bring Visitors Back With Push Notifications

Push notifications give you a way to reach visitors after they leave your site, even if they never joined your email list.

PushEngage sends a browser notification when you publish something new. Readers who opt in to those notifications can come back without ever giving you an email address.

PushEngage’s free plan covers up to 200 subscribers. Paid plans add automated drip campaigns that welcome new subscribers over several days.

If push notifications are new to you, we explain how web push notifications work in plain terms. Your check afterward is returning visitors. If more people come back once you start sending, the notifications are doing their job.

How to Measure User Engagement in WordPress With MonsterInsights

Measuring engagement shows you which of your changes are working and which pages still lose visitors.

MonsterInsights puts your engagement numbers inside your WordPress dashboard, so you don’t need to open Google Analytics to check them. Take a reading before you change a page, then check the same numbers a few weeks later.

Get a Site-Wide Baseline From the Overview Report

The Overview report (Insights » Reports » Overview) is the place to start. Click the Engagement tab above the graph to see Sessions, Engaged Sessions and Engagement Rate for your whole site.

The Key Metrics row below the graph adds Bounce Rate, New Users, Returning Users and Session Duration. Session Duration gives you a read on time on site, and Returning Users is the check for push notifications.

A site-wide number tells you whether things are moving overall. To see which pages need the work, go one level down.

Find the Pages That Lose the Most Visitors

The Landing Page Details report shows which entry pages hold visitors and which lose them. In the reports menu, open Traffic » Landing Page Details and look at the Top Landing Pages table (Plus plan and above).

The table lists each entry page with its Sessions, Engaged Sessions and Pages / Sessions.

Pages with plenty of sessions but few engaged sessions are the ones to fix first. The Pages / Sessions column is your pages-per-visit number for each entry page.

To compare engagement by channel instead of by page, open Traffic » Overview and scroll to the Traffic Details table. It shows the same columns for each channel, such as organic search or email.

How to Tell Whether Each Change Worked

Each engagement tip moves a different number, so the report to open depends on what you changed. Here’s where to look after each one:

• After tightening your content (tip 1) or cleaning up your mobile layout (tip 9), check Average Scroll Depth in the Scroll section of the Publishers report. It’s an average across all your pages, so a single page’s scroll depth needs scroll depth tracking in Google Analytics.
• After adding internal links, popular posts (tip 7) or a clear next step (tip 10), check Pages / Sessions in Landing Page Details for any of those pages that visitors land on first.
• If your next step links to another site, a file or an affiliate offer, check Total Clicks in the Publishers report. The Top Outbound Links, Top Affiliate Links and Top Download Links tables list those clicks. A button that points to another page on your own site needs custom link attribution, a small attribute in the link’s HTML. Its clicks then show up under Publishers » Events.
• After adding video (tip 8), open the Media report (Plus plan and above) to see Video Plays, Avg. Watch Time, Avg. % Watched and Completion Rate for each video.
• After speed fixes (tip 3), click Run Audit in the Site Speed report again and compare the scores.
• After you start sending push notifications (tip 12), watch Returning Users in the Overview report’s Key Metrics row.

Give each change a few weeks before you judge it, since a single week of data can swing on one busy day.

The Media report deserves a closer look if you’ve added video. Avg. % Watched tells you whether visitors stay past the opening seconds or click away.

Most of this data needs no setup. On the Plus plan and above, MonsterInsights tracks scroll depth, outbound and affiliate link clicks, and file downloads automatically.

Affiliate links outside the /go/ and /recommend/ paths need a one-time entry under Insights » Settings » Publisher. Video tracking also comes with the Plus plan, and the Pro plan adds form tracking, eCommerce tracking, author tracking and User ID tracking.

We tour every report in our walkthrough of the MonsterInsights dashboard.

Once your reports are in place, improving engagement becomes a simple loop. Pick one low-engagement landing page, apply one tip, and add a Site Note (Insights » Site Notes) on the day you make the change.

A few weeks later, check that page’s Engaged Sessions and Pages / Sessions again. The note marks the date on your graph, so the before-and-after is easy to read.

Video Tutorial: How to Increase User Engagement on Your Website

In the video below, we walk through the first eight tips from this guide.

The video predates tips 9 to 12, so we cover mobile reading, clear next steps, comments and push notifications in writing only.

FAQs About Increasing User Engagement

Engagement grows one page at a time, and the page that loses the most visitors today is a good place to begin. We hope these tips help you turn more of those visitors into readers who stay, click and come back.

For more on how to keep visitors on your website and understand what they do there, these beginner-friendly guides make a good next read:

• How to Reduce Bounce Rate
• User Behavior Analytics: Tools, Key Metrics & More
• How to Improve Your Website User Experience
• Landing Page Best Practices to Maximize Conversions
• Push Notification Marketing for WordPress: Quick-Start Guide

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