When visitors arrive at your website and immediately leave, this is called a “bounce.” The percentage of these single-page visits represents your bounce rate—a key metric that can indicate whether your website is operating effectively.
For online store owners, a high bounce rate signals missed opportunities, with each bounce representing a lost potential sale, subscription, or customer relationship.
What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate captures how often visitors leave a site without clicking on the page, interacting with the content, exploring other pages, or following calls to action (CTAs) to purchase products or sign up for emails. (In Google Analytics 4, or GA4, it’s specifically a measure of visitors who leave within 10 seconds without interacting.) It’s an excellent metric for understanding the user experience on specific pages and on your website as a whole.
A high bounce rate indicates that a site is experiencing technical problems, publishing content that doesn’t resonate with its target audience, or both.
How does bounce rate affect website performance?
Since bounce rate is a measurement of user engagement, it can help you infer how well your website’s content is performing. Your site’s bounce rate is correlated with other factors, such as:
Sales
High bounce rates directly correlate to lower sales because visitors aren’t sticking around long enough to become customers. They’re less likely to purchase from a site they’re not compelled to explore or engage with.
Conversion rates
As with sales, high bounce rates tend to hurt web conversions, such as email or subscription signups. When visitors leave quickly, they miss opportunities to engage with your conversion elements.
Engagement rate
Bounce rate and engagement rate are inversely related. A high bounce rate indicates a low engagement rate, and vice versa.
What is a good bounce rate?
A typical bounce rate depends on your industry, content types, and website purpose. Bounce rate averages can range quite a bit; search engine optimization (SEO) platform Ahrefs says the average for all sites falls between 40% and 60%, while SEO expert Neil Patel puts it at 45%.
Here are some content- and industry-specific ranges you can use as benchmarks:
Content websites
Bounce rates for content-driven websites like blogs and news sites hover around 65% to 90%. High numbers like this aren’t necessarily alarming when you consider how many readers visit to read a specific article or story, then leave when they’re finished.
B2B websites
Visitors typically use business-to-business (B2B) sites to research products or services, which often requires viewing several pages. That’s why B2B websites tend toward the lower end of the bounce rate spectrum, usually coming in around 25% to 65% across industries.
Ecommerce sites
According to data aggregated from Plausible Analytics, SaleHoo, and Convertcart, the average ecommerce bounce rate in 2025 is between 36% and 47%, while most sources agree that 20% to 45% is the benchmark for high-performing ecommerce sites.
Landing pages
High bounce rates are normal for certain types of landing pages, like FAQs or glossaries, which can reach bounce rate averages as high as 90%. Picture your audience searching a question, visiting your landing page, quickly getting the answer, then bouncing; they got what they came for, so this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Average bounce rates by industry
Understanding how your bounce rate compares to industry averages can provide valuable context. Here’s how different ecommerce sectors perform:
Food and beverage
The food and beverage industry has one of the highest bounce rates, at around 65%. This may be due to the nature of food browsing, where customers often check menus or specific items before deciding to visit in person.
Beauty and cosmetics
The bounce rates of online beauty and cosmetics stores tend to be near the 50% mark.
Fashion and apparel
If you’ve ever explored your favourite clothing brand’s website, browsing new trends and designs, then it’s easy to understand how audience interest and engagement lead to relatively low bounce rates for clothing and footwear stores, around 28% to 38%.
Bounce rate by traffic source
Different traffic sources yield varying bounce rates:
Display advertising
Display advertising has a high bounce rate compared to other traffic sources, coming in at 56.5%. This is because consumers generally mistrust banner ads, often clicking them accidentally.
Social media traffic
Recent industry benchmarks put average bounce rates for social media traffic around 54%. Users from social platforms often want to see specific content and then return to their browsing.
Direct traffic
Direct traffic has a bounce rate near 50%. This even blend reflects different intentions, with some loyal users bookmarking or typing out frequently visited URLs, then engaging deeply with the content, while others quickly find the answers to their questions and leave.
Organic search
The average organic search bounce rate hovers around 43% and reflects various search intents. For example, a user looking for a quick answer may bounce as soon as they find what they came for, while a user who didn’t find what they’re looking for will leave quickly for the opposite reason.
Email marketing
Still the golden child of marketing strategies, email marketing boasts the lowest average bounce rate of all traffic sources. People who receive your emails likely opted in because they’re interested in what you offer.
What causes a high bounce rate?
Monitoring bounce rates can provide insights into engagement and performance. Common sources of high bounce rates include:
Slow page load times
Impatience is a hallmark of the internet era, and if your website takes longer than two to three seconds to load, users will likely bounce.
Irrelevant or low-quality site content
Your website needs to meet user expectations and provide them value. The same goes if they land on a story that’s poorly written or lacking the details they came for. This is especially true for product pages that don’t provide enough details for customers to make informed decisions, and applies to all your content—meaning your CTAs and any other content on a given page should be clearly related.
Poor user experience (U/X) or bad design
If visitors click on a page that’s poorly laid out or hard to use—in other words, if it offers a poor user experience—then they’ll probably leave. Avoid designs or features that can frustrate your customers, such as intrusive pop-up ads, and ensure your user flow is simple and intuitive. And this should go without saying, but ensure your site designs are on-brand and in line with industry standards, because people really do judge websites by their covers.
Technical errors
Technical errors can hinder the effectiveness of a website and negatively affect user experience. Problems like broken links and 404 error pages can detrimentally affect user engagement and retention, particularly for new visitors.
Mismatched metadata
Readers may ignore meta tags such as title tags and meta robots tag, but that doesn’t mean you can. Meta tags help search engines classify your site content and determine what it’s for, so they can then match user queries to the correct information. So if your site contains tags like “kids t-shirts” but you only have adult shoes in stock—in other words, if your content doesn’t match users’ search intent—then would-be shirt shoppers are likely to leave.
The site isn’t optimized for mobile devices
Mobile visits account for well over half of all website visits, racking in at 62% in early 2025. If your site is hard to use when they’re on their phones or tablets, then they’ll probably get annoyed and exit.
How to measure bounce rate
You can view bounce rate and other valuable conversion rate optimization metrics with a web analytics program like Google Analytics. Simply customize your reports to include bounce rate data, or use this formula:
To calculate bounce rate, use this formula:
(# of Single-Page Sessions / # of All Sessions) x 100% = Bounce Rate
It’s worth noting that Google Analytics 4 calculates bounce rate a little differently:
100% − Engagement Rate = Bounce Rate
How to reduce bounce rate
If your website has higher bounce rates than expected, consider these remedies to help reduce your bounce rate:
1. Optimize site design
- Improve site speed: If your page load speed exceeds two seconds, you have a problem. Implementing strategies such as optimizing images, using a content delivery network (CDN), and upgrading your hosting service can enhance site speed and reduce bounce rate.
- Simplify navigation: When it’s good, visitors won’t ever wonder how to navigate your site—they’ll simply know. Follow these tips for optimizing website structure and navigation.
- Optimize for mobile: Since more than half of your visitors access your website from their mobile phones, ensure it’s designed with mobile in mind, using responsive web design that accommodates the parameters of their handheld screens to deliver a pleasant experience.
2. Produce relevant content
- Give visitors what they want: That includes relevant and relatable content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-E-A-T), and that satisfies their user intent. Or to put it another way, if you want them to stay—and to return—then know your audience so you can give them what they came for.
- Practice thoughtful internal linking: Help your readers stick around by making it easy for them to discover related content. Internal linking—like this literal example of a link to an article that discusses internal linking—ensures relevant info is always close at hand.
A well-designed website populated with relevant content is an online business’s best asset, but it’s not a one-and-done affair. You’ll also need to follow SEO best practices, implement A/B testing to validate your choices, and stay on top of your target audience’s needs and desires to ensure your site continues meeting the needs of your market.
Bounce rate FAQ
What does a zero bounce rate mean?
When a website has a zero percent bounce rate, it means every visitor who went to the site interacted with multiple pages or various elements on it. This percentage is extremely rare and not often achievable, since even some of the most engaging websites will inevitably have users who will visit one page and leave.
Does bounce rate affect conversion rates?
Yes, bounce rates can affect conversion rates, and the two are interconnected in various ways. If a website’s bounce rate is high, it’s likely not engaging its visitors enough for them to then purchase products, sign up for email newsletters, or click to other parts of the site.
Is bounce rate the only metric to consider when evaluating website performance?
Bounce rate is only one metric among many you can use to evaluate your website’s performance. You can look at multiple metrics—like conversion rate, pages per session, email signups, and organic traffic—to get a holistic sense of interest and engagement.
What is the difference between bounce rate and exit rate?
Both bounce rate and exit rate are metrics for assessing a website’s engagement and performance, but they measure different behaviors. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on a page and leave without interacting further (or, if you’re looking at bounce rate in GA4, who leave within 10 seconds without interacting), also known as a single-page session. Exit rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave your website from a specific page, regardless of how many pages they visited before. It determines which pages visitors tend to exit from.
Is bounce rate the sole indicator of user satisfaction?
While bounce rate provides some insight into a site’s first impression on a user, it’s not the sole indicator of user satisfaction. Website owners utilize various tools and analytics to measure user satisfaction, including the frequency of return visits and engagement with CTAs, such as internal links and email signup fields.
Does a high bounce rate always indicate a problem?
A high bounce rate doesn’t always spell trouble. For certain types of websites, like blogs, news sites, or specific landing pages, a high bounce rate may be normal or even expected. The context of your website’s purpose is crucial when interpreting bounce rate data. A high bounce rate is a red flag if it coincides with poor engagement or low conversions, or if it doesn’t reflect the page’s primary purpose.
