If you measure success by how much traffic you drive to your website, it’s time to tweak your tactics. Nowadays, it’s just not enough to bring people to your website. You need to attract the right people and keep them there. This is where bounce rate comes into play.

What Does "Bounce Rate" Mean?

Bounce rate, by definition, is the percentage of visitors who come to your website and leave without viewing another page. For example, the more people come to your homepage and immediately exit, the higher your bounce rate.

Why Bounce Rate is Important 

A high bounce rate is considered to be over 60%. This means that visitors are coming to your site, then leaving quickly. A bounce rate of over 60% could also bring several other issues to light, which is why you need to investigate your website’s analytics. See example below.

If your bounce rate is below 40%, that’s a good thing. It means viewers are viewing more than one of your website’s pages in a given session. See example below.

Start your research by running Google’s Page Speed test. It is free to the public and all you need to do is simply enter your website’s URL and hit enter. Once you do that, you will see how quickly your page loads when visitors come to your site. This tool also gives you statistics on your page and optimization suggestions to improve your website.

A few things to avoid:

These types of disruptions only encourage visitors to click the red “x” at the top corner of their screen or click the “back” button.

Next, review your bounce rate per traffic source. You can see if people visiting via paid search, referrals, social media posts, direct traffic, organic search, or emails are more or less likely to view multiple pages. If one of these traffic sources has a higher bounce rate, consider rethinking your messaging, your approach to attracting the right audience, and/or your page title tags and descriptions.

You can also lower your bounce rate by improving your user’s experience and the overall design of your website. Take a look at your website’s main navigation and footer to make sure that it’s easier to understand and doesn’t discourage visitors because they can’t find what they need. The goal here is to get visitors engaged with your site so that they keep clicking around.

By reducing your bounce rate, you will improve your user’s experience. This could make your visitors want to read more of your web content, improve your brand, and ultimately become a loyal customer.