In this article, I have summarized the bounce rates of six food blogs that have published their bounce rates online.
Based on this sample, the average food blog bounce rate is 85%.
Bounces Rates of 6 Real-World Food Blogs
| Blog | Bounce Rate | Sessions p.m. | Year/Month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pinch of Yum | 78.9% | 3,128,994 | 2016/11 |
| Butternut Bakery | 81.3% | 91,957 | 2019/09 |
| A Sassy Spoon | 86.9% | 172,868 | 2019/Avg. |
| Kitchen Sanctuary | 87.2% | 827,861 | 2018/10 |
| Fork in the Road | 88.4% | 26,839 | 2020/06 |
| Bon Aippetit | 88.5% | 14,557 | 2019/04 |
| Average | 85.2% | 710,513 | various |
Does the Traffic Mix Influence Bounce Rates?
My first thought was that the differences in bounce rate may result from the blogs’ different traffic mixes.
Maybe food blogs that rely more on Pinterest traffic have a higher bounce rate than food blogs that drive most of their traffic from Google? Or perhaps the other way around? (In case you haven’t read my article on how food blogs get traffic: Google and Pinterest are the predominant traffic sources for food blogs.)
So I checked the bounce rates against the data from my traffic mix analysis, which I had done for the same set of blogs (and some more).
However, it turns out that there is no correlation between the blogs’ traffic mix and the bounce rate. Some blogs with a high portion of Google traffic have a high bounce rate, others have a low one. The same is true with regard to the portion of Pinterest traffic.
It really does appear to depend on the blog itself: How well is it designed for keeping readers on the site?
One Genius Tip for Reducing Your Food Blog’s Bounce Rate
If you google “How to reduce bounce rate”, you will find hundreds of general tips. Provide a great user experience, have a clean web design, make sure your site displays properly on mobile, ensure your site loads fast, and so on.
It’s not that these points aren’t true and important – they are. But they’re not specific to food blogs and I don’t see much value in repeating them here.
Instead, I would like to share one tip for reducing your food blog’s bounce rate that I saw on RecipeTin Eats and that I think is pure genius:
Add a “What to Serve With” Section to Your Recipes.
Take a look at this Massaman Curry Lamb Shanks recipe. At the end of the recipe description, but right before the recipe card, Nagi (the author) has placed a section called “What to serve with Massaman Curry Lamb Shanks“.
There, you find comments on which rice to use, Asian side salad suggestions, and other Thai side dishes and starters. Of course, each suggestion is a link to another recipe article at RecipeTin Eats.
What a brilliant way of providing additional value to the readers and, at the same time, keeping them on your site. It’s a variant of the widely used “related posts” method but beautifully adapted to fit a recipe blog.
Speaking of brilliant: If you would like to learn more tricks that the best food bloggers use to delight their readers, grow their traffic, and monetize their food blogs, you can find dozens of those in my free Ultimate Food Niche Guide 😉