Quick answer
Bounce rate is the percentage of visits that land on one page of your site and leave without doing anything else: no second page, no click your analytics records, no form sent. A high figure can point to a problem, but on pages that answer a question straight away it’s often perfectly normal.
What a bounce actually is
A bounce is a visit with one page and nothing after it. Someone arrives from Google, a newsletter link or a social post, reads the page (or doesn’t) and then closes the tab or hits back. Your analytics saw a single pageview, then silence.
The rate is simply the share of visits that ended like that. You’ll usually see it for the site as a whole and for each page, and the two tell you different things. The site-wide figure blends pages with very different jobs, so on its own it says little. The per-page figure is where the useful questions start.
One detail trips people up. A bounce is counted against the page where the visit started, the landing page. If someone lands on your homepage, clicks through to a product and leaves from there, that’s not a bounce for either page. Leaving from the product page is an exit, a separate metric covered in exit rate.
How to calculate it, with an example
Bounce rate = single-page sessions that started on the page ÷ all sessions that started on the page × 100
A session is one visit: a run of activity by the same person that ends after a spell of inactivity.
Say your candle shop’s “Autumn collection” page was the landing page for 1,200 sessions last month. In 540 of them, the visitor looked at the page and left. The other 660 went on to a product, the basket or somewhere else.
540 ÷ 1,200 × 100 = 45%
Now take the same shop’s “Delivery and returns” page. 300 sessions started there and 240 of them went nowhere else. That’s 80%. It looks alarming next to 45%. Is it?
Why a high figure isn’t always bad
Think about why someone lands on a delivery page. They searched “do you deliver to Ireland”, the page said yes, £6.95, three to five working days, and they went back to finish deciding. The page did its job. The visit counts as a bounce only because the answer was on the first page they saw.
The same goes for:
- A contact page where people copy your phone number or address, then leave to ring you or drive over.
- A blog post that answers a how-to question in full.
- An opening-times page for a yoga studio.
- A landing page whose only button sends people to an external booking system your analytics can’t see.
On pages like these a high figure is the expected result, so don’t chase it down. A lower figure on a contact page could even mean people couldn’t find the number and went hunting for it.
Where it should worry you is on pages built to move people on: a category page, a product page, a pricing page, the free preview lesson for a LearnDash course. If eight in ten people land on your course sales page and leave without reaching the curriculum or clicking “Enrol”, that’s worth a proper look.
So the honest answer to “what’s a good number?” is that there isn’t one. It varies a lot by page type, traffic source and kind of site, and published averages lump together sites so different from yours that they’re not much help. Compare a page with its own history, and with similar pages on your own site.
How GA4 changed the idea
Google’s older Universal Analytics counted a bounce as a session with only one interaction recorded, which was normally a single pageview. A visitor who spent ten minutes reading your 2,000-word guide and then left still counted as a bounce. That was the metric’s biggest weakness.
GA4, which took over when Google switched Universal Analytics off in 2023, starts from the other end. It counts engaged sessions: sessions that last longer than 10 seconds (the default, which you can change), include a key event such as a purchase, or include at least two page or screen views. Engagement rate is the share of sessions that were engaged, and GA4’s bounce figure is everything else: the share of sessions that were not engaged.
In GA4, then, the ten-minute reader isn’t a bounce at all. The visitor who glanced for three seconds and left is.
What this means for you:
- Figures from Universal Analytics and GA4 aren’t comparable, so don’t line up an old report against a new one and conclude something changed.
- Other tools use their own definitions. Before comparing numbers from two tools, check what each one counts as a bounce.
- A satisfied reader and a frustrated one can look the same unless you also check time on page.
What causes a high bounce rate
When a page that should lead somewhere is losing people on arrival, the usual causes are:
- A mismatch with the source. The search snippet, ad or post promised one thing and the page shows another. Someone searching “unscented soy candles” who lands on your bestsellers page will leave.
- Slow loading. If nothing appears for several seconds on a phone, some people give up first. Heavy sliders, oversized images and a pile of plugins are the usual WordPress culprits.
- A crowded first screen on mobile. A cookie notice, a newsletter pop-up and a chat bubble all fighting for the same few square inches.
- No obvious next step. The page answers the question but offers nothing after it: no product, no “read next”, no booking button.
- The wrong visitors. A post that does well on social media can bring lots of people who were never going to buy candles. That’s fine, just don’t judge the page by them.
- Tracking faults. If the tracking script fires twice, bounces can drop to almost nothing; if it’s missing from some pages, they can shoot up. A sudden overnight change is more often a tracking change than a change in behaviour.
Always look at the figure by traffic source. The same page often behaves very differently for search, social and email visitors.
Practical fixes for WordPress sites
Start with pages that earn you money and get enough visits to read anything into. A page with 20 sessions a month will swing about wildly whatever you do.
- Match the promise. Read the search snippet, ad or social post that sends people to the page, then read the first screen. Do they say the same thing? If not, rewrite the heading and opening lines.
- Speed up the first view. Compress and correctly size images, use a caching plugin, remove plugins you no longer use and be wary of page builders that load heavy scripts everywhere. Test on a real phone over mobile data, not only on the office Wi-Fi.
- Clear the first screen. Delay or drop pop-ups for first-time visitors and make sure the cookie notice doesn’t cover the content.
- Offer one clear next step. A product page needs a visible “Add to basket”. A blog post can end with two related posts or the product it mentions. A service page needs a booking or contact button near the top, not only at the bottom.
- Link from inside the text. A link placed where it’s relevant usually earns more clicks than a block of links tacked on at the end.
- Fix broken links and 404s. An error page with a search box and links to popular pages keeps more people than a bare “Not found”.
Then give each change a few weeks of normal traffic before deciding whether it worked, and watch what happens to sales or enquiries from the page as well as the bounce figure.
Reading it alongside other numbers
On its own this is a blunt measure. Pair it with time on page to separate quick escapes from happy readers, with exit rate to see where people drop out mid-visit, and above all with conversion rate, which is usually the question you really care about. Analyzine, for example, reports conversions and conversion rate by source and campaign inside wp-admin, so you can see whether a page’s visitors go on to order, enrol or book.
If a page bounces a lot but the few people who stay convert well, it probably needs better-matched traffic rather than a redesign.
Frequently asked questions
Does bounce rate affect SEO?
Not directly. Google has said publicly that it doesn’t use Google Analytics data in its rankings, so the figure in your reports isn’t something the search engine reads. What does matter is whether the page satisfies the people searching for it, and a page that sends searchers straight back to the results probably isn’t.
Is a high bounce rate bad?
It depends on the page. On a contact, opening-times or delivery page, a high figure usually means people found the answer at once. On a product, category or pricing page that’s meant to lead somewhere, it’s a reason to look closer.
How do I reduce bounce rate on WordPress?
Make sure the page matches what the visitor was promised, make it load quickly on a phone, keep pop-ups off the first screen and give one obvious next step. Fix broken links and 404s too. Then measure for a few weeks before you judge the result.
Does scrolling count as an interaction?
Under the classic definition, scrolling alone didn’t stop a visit counting as a bounce unless the site recorded it as an event. In GA4, a visitor who stays longer than 10 seconds counts as engaged whether they scroll or not. Other tools vary, so check your tool’s definition.
Can I still see bounces in GA4?
Yes. It exists as a metric in GA4 but isn’t shown in most of the standard reports. You can add it by customising a report or by building an exploration. Remember that GA4’s version is the share of sessions that weren’t engaged, so it won’t match older figures.
What is a good bounce rate?
There’s no universal good number. It varies a great deal by page type, traffic source and kind of site. Track each important page against its own history and against similar pages on your site, not against an industry average.
