Bounce rate describes a one-page visit where people visit your site and leave without taking action. This metric shows you if you can convince the user to stay on your site and engage with the content. Engagement could be by clicking a link, a button, or navigating to other pages. A high bounce rate might indicate that your page load speed is slow, your website is not mobile-friendly, or that visitors don’t find your content fitting for them.

But here is the trick. A high bounce rate is not necessarily alarming. For blog posts or Q&A pages, bounce rates can be increased, even though the content is excellent. The reason is that people find their answers without the need to navigate further within your website – they leave because they got what they wanted. Therefore, before improving the bounce rate on a specific page, think about what kind of content your visitors like to see. That’s why it is important to not solely look at the bounce rate but combine it with metrics like time on page. That way, you will find the pages that are currently underperforming.

Contrary to bounce rate, exit rate represents the number of people who left a specific page, even if they didn’t initially land on it. For example, if a visitor visits your page and leaves without further interaction, that is a bounce. However, if a visitor visits three pages before leaving, that is recorded as an exit.

Calculate the website bounce rate by dividing the number of one-page visits by the number of total visits. Keep in mind that you can find the bounce rate in your Google Analytics dashboard, so you don’t have to calculate it yourself.

Website Bounce rate = Number of one-page visits / Number of total visits

For example, if 100 people visited only one page on your website and 200 people visited your page, your bounce rate is 50% (100 / 200 * 100 = 50%)

• Improve your page speed
• Make your page mobile-friendly
• Show the value of your service immediately
• Publish quality content that is valuable to your audience
• Use internal links to guide visitors through your page
• Use a clear call to action buttons