Picture a person walking into a store, taking a five-second look around, then turning on their heel and walking back out. Not only did this would-have-been/could-have-been customer not make any purchases, they probably didn’t even get a lasting impression of the place that might warrant a return.
Instead, they just, well, bounced.
The same phenomenon happens online. A website’s bounce rate is the calculated percentage of visitors who leave the site after landing on only one page, without clicking through to other pages and without meaningfully engaging with the content on the single page they visit.
The more you know about your site’s bounce rate, the more you can do to try to lower it by making changes that keep people hanging around.
How Bounce Rate is Calculated
“Bounce rate refers to the fraction or percentage of visitors landing on your website and leaving without conducting an action,” reiterates Aditya Chauhan, digital marketer with D’Genius Solutions. “It’s a metric that shows how well your website can retain the attention of web visitors.”
To determine bounce rate, divide the number of single-page visitors to a site by total site users and then multiply by 100. (You can determine the number of visitors in the backend of your site, or by connecting it to a service like Google Analytics or Semrush.) If, in a given hour, 100 people came to the site and 50 left after viewing just one page, that’s a bounce rate of 50%, as 50 divided by 100 is 0.5, and that times 100 is 50. For a more realistic example, if your site had 13,567 total visitors in a day and 6,544 of them bounced, your bounce rate would be 49.2%. Once you know the formula, it’s very easy to calculate.
Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate
Everyone clicks (or taps) away from a website eventually, and that’s okay — especially if they come back. When a user closes or navigates away from a website, that’s called an exit. Tracking the site exits from a specific page gives you your exit rate.
While both “bounce rate” and “exit rate” measure how users leave a website, the key difference is that bounce rate specifically refers to visitors who leave a site after viewing only one page (their landing page), while exit rate measures the percentage of users who leave from a specific page, regardless of how many other pages they visited on the site. Essentially, all bounces are considered exits, but not all exits are bounces.
What Is a Good Bounce Rate?
A 40% or lower bounce rate is considered excellent, while above 60% is cause for concern, so it’s worth investing the effort to get that bounce rate lower. “It really depends on the type of website you’re running, and it varies by industry,” says Jonathan Alonso, CMO of E2E Cleaning. “But as a rule of thumb, 50% or lower is your target.”
Does Bounce Rate Affect SEO?
If your site’s SEO is inauthentic and draws people in only for them to find pages that don’t actually provide the information they were promised, you can rest assured visitors will bounce quickly. This will, in turn, negatively affect your site’s ranking.
Common Causes of High Bounce Rates
“One major cause of high bounce rates is clickbait links,” says Harrison Tang, co-founder and CEO of Spokeo. “This occurs when you advertise one thing, but the linked page does not serve the intended purpose. This causes frustration, leading to increased bounce rates. Therefore, be sure that when marketing, you link to the appropriate landing page so the audience doesn’t perceive it as clickbait. This will increase your authority as a business and significantly decrease your bounce rates.”
Another all-too-common cause is a site that’s simply not that visually appealing. If your site is overly cluttered, looks dated, is confusing, or is otherwise just not appealing at a quick glance, visitors are likely to leave it in a hurry.
Slow loading times and poor website functionality can also lead to a higher bounce rate than you’d like. Streamlining your site’s efficacy and making sure all links and buttons work, videos and graphics load properly, and other similar maintenance can help immensely.
Why Bounce Rate Matters for Website Success
“Bounce rate provides a possibility to detect how the website engages an audience,” says Dmytro Romanchenko, CEO of Syndicode. “It shows the percentage of visitors who landed on a page and left it without further delay, and who interacted with it — for instance, clicked on a link, filled out a form, or navigated to another page. By analyzing bounce rates alongside other metrics, like time on page and conversion rates, businesses can gain deeper insights into user behavior and make informed decisions to optimize their website. A high bounce rate is an indication of a user’s dissatisfaction.”
A high bounce rate may impact more than just the way human visitors feel about your site. “A high bounce rate means that you’re disappointing your consumers,” says Brittany Betts, director of marketing and PR at The 100 Collection. “It means your site potentially going down in ranking via search engines because you are not displaying helpful information.”
How to Analyze Bounce Rate Effectively
We discussed how to calculate your bounce rate, but what do those numbers mean? “An elevated bounce rate usually indicates that visitors don’t find what they expected to find, whether that’s content that doesn’t match their interests, a page that loads too slowly, or navigation that confuses them,” says Marc Hardgrove, CEO at TheHoth. “Keeping track of this metric is essential since it shows how well your website engages users and keeps them coming back.”
To effectively analyze your site’s bounce rate, first contextualize it with other metrics, like time spent on a page — someone who spends 15 minutes reading an article and then exits hardly bounced! — and conversion rates. Next, compare your rate to industry benchmarks by searching the average number of visitors to a competitor’s site, information which is often publicly available — if most similar sites have a 65% bounce rate and yours is 55%, that’s not bad.
Don’t just look at those raw bounce rate numbers: Instead, understand the reasons behind them by examining user behavior across your website and how it fits more broadly beyond your own site.
Strategies to Improve Bounce Rate
“There are four main steps to take when seeing pages with higher than normal bounce rates,” says Alonso. “The first is qualifying your content. Is it up to date? Does your content solve a problem? Second, website issues can also cause this. Check for website speed: How fast is the page loading? Are there broken images and videos, or even misspellings within the content? Third, try adding videos, tables, and visual data that enrich your content to help increase your visitors’ engagement. Finally, if you have an ecommerce site, a high bounce rate can simply mean being out of stock, but can also mean site issues, such as not displaying enough information about your products.”
Myths and Misconceptions About Bounce Rate
The most common misunderstanding about bounce rate is that a high one is always, categorically, a problem. “A high bounce rate on a landing page isn’t always a bad thing,” says Nikola Baldikov, founder and CEO of Inbound Blogging. “If someone fills out a form or downloads a resource and leaves, that’s a success — their customer journey ended where it was supposed to. But on a page meant to drive deeper engagement, it’s a red flag.”
Key Takeaways
You are largely responsible for your site’s bounce rate, and you can bring it down if you put in the effort. “Slow loading times are boring and waste viewers’ time, making it an obvious cause for them to click away from your website,” says Chauhan. “Poor content quality can make all the difference. The overuse of clickbait or misleading titles coupled with low-quality content can be your downfall, and overcomplicated or simply poor website design can perplex the audience.”
So, a site that provides content that’s valuable to the user, works well, and looks good is key to reducing bounce rate.
It’s also critical that you monitor your bounce rate regularly to see if the changes you implement have things shifting in the right direction. “Managing bounce rate is vital to website success — it’s a metric you cannot ignore,” says Chauhan.
Aim for a bounce rate below 50%, with a bounce rate under 40% being truly good news. And remember, to calculate your bounce rate, divide the “bouncers” by the total visitors, then multiply that number by 100.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Does a high bounce rate always indicate a problem?
No, not always. As noted, sometimes your site’s visitors may well complete the desired action on a single page, so the fact that they did not explore your entire site is not indicative of an issue. And remember, there is more to site success than low bounce rate alone.
“Bounce rate is a useful metric, but only in context,” says Baldikov. “The goal isn’t just to lower it — it’s to make the site work better for your audience. As long as you understand their needs and focus on making every interaction smooth, you will be able to create a site that brings conversions.”
How does bounce rate impact SEO rankings?
A high bounce rate can, over time, negatively impact your website’s ranking by signaling to search engines that your content is not relevant or engaging to visitors. A high bounce rate can indicate issues like poor quality content or a badly designed website, which can lead to lower rankings.
Which tools can I use to track and improve my bounce rate?
“Fast loading times, clear call to actions, and content that matches with what visitors are looking for help reduce bounce rates,” says Adam Yong of Agility Writer. So, clean up your site!
“Focus on clear messaging and easy navigation to reduce bounce rate,” adds Gerti Mema of Equipment Finance Canada. “Focus on improving the user experience and ensuring visitors find what they need easily. Start by making your website fast, as slow page speed is one of the reasons people leave. Sites such as Google PageSpeed Insights can be used to discover areas for improvement.”
You can track and analyze your bounce rate with tools like heatmaps and other graphs that lay out data over time, making it easy to see if you are trending in the right direction.
Is bounce rate affected by mobile vs. desktop traffic?
Bounce rate is significantly affected by whether traffic comes from mobile devices or desktops, with typical mobile users exhibiting a higher bounce rate than desktop users. People are simply more likely to leave a website after viewing only one page when accessing it on their phone compared to browsing on a computer.
