Why your website's bounce rate is so high

Google’s definition is exact. A session is engaged if it lasts longer than 10 seconds, includes a key event, or includes two or more page views. Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that met none of the three.

A visitor who reads a page for a minute and leaves is engaged, and is not a bounce. The figure measures people who arrived and left almost at once.

Some pages are finished with in one visit: an opening-hours page, a phone number, a short answer. A visitor who finds it and leaves has been served. Judge those pages by whether they did their job, not by the rate.

The rate matters on pages that exist to lead somewhere: the home page, service pages, product pages and landing pages for advertising. A visitor who leaves those within seconds has seen something that put them off.

Most high rates on pages that matter come from one of five things.

1. The page is slow. A visitor who waits five seconds often does not wait six. Our guide to why a website is slow covers the causes.
2. The page does not match what brought the visitor. The advertisement or search result promised one thing and the page opens on another.
3. The first screen does not say what the page is. A large photograph and a slogan leave the visitor to guess.
4. The page is hard to use on a phone. Our guide to a website that looks bad on mobile lists the faults.
5. The wrong visitors are arriving. No page keeps a visitor who wanted something else.

Sort the pages report by sessions and read the bounce rate beside each. Then split a high-rate page by where its visitors came from. A page that keeps visitors from search and loses those from an advertisement has a targeting problem, not a page problem.

Start with the busiest page that has the highest rate, since that is where the most visitors are lost. Fix one cause, leave it for a few hundred visits and compare. Visitors who stay and still do not enquire are a different problem, covered in a website that is not getting enquiries.