Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on your site, view only one page, and leave without taking any action.
What it means
When someone visits your site, lands on a page, and then leaves without clicking anything else, that's a bounce. A high bounce rate often means your page didn't match what the visitor was looking for, loaded too slowly, or didn't have a clear next step.
Bounce rate gets a bad reputation because people assume high is always bad. That's not quite right. A blog post that fully answers a reader's question might have a 90% bounce rate, and that's fine. The reader got what they wanted and left. A pricing page with a 90% bounce rate is a different story: those visitors were ready to learn more and left disappointed.
Context matters. Always look at bounce rate alongside time on page and conversion rate. A high bounce rate with a high conversion rate means your page is doing its job perfectly. A high bounce rate with a low conversion rate means something is off.
Why it matters
Bounce rate is one of the fastest signals that something is wrong. It catches issues before your conversion rate does, because visitors leave before they ever get a chance to convert. If your bounce rate suddenly jumps, something changed: a page edit, a slow asset, or a traffic source that no longer matches your offer.
How to calculate bounce rate
Bounce Rate = (Single-page sessions / Total sessions) × 100
Divide the number of single-page sessions by total sessions, then multiply by 100.
Example with real numbers
Concrete example showing how this metric works in practice.
Scenario
Your landing page had 2,000 visitors last week. 1,400 of them viewed only the landing page and left.
Calculation
(1,400 / 2,000) × 100 = 70%
What it means
Your bounce rate is 70%. For a landing page where you want visitors to sign up or explore further, that's high. Worth checking page speed, headline relevance, and whether the CTA is clear.
What's a good number?
Typical benchmarks. Always compare against your own historical data first, industry averages second.
Above 80%
60% to 80%
40% to 60%
Below 40%
These are typical landing page benchmarks. Blog posts and reference pages naturally have higher bounce rates (often 70% to 90%) because the visitor's goal is to read one thing and leave.
Common mistakes
Things people get wrong when measuring bounce rate.
Mistake 01
Treating high bounce rate as automatically bad. For content pages, it often means visitors got what they came for.
Mistake 02
Not segmenting bounce rate by page type. Your homepage and blog posts have very different healthy bounce rates.
Mistake 03
Adding a popup or modal that delays the visible page, which inflates bounce rate without improving the actual experience.
Mistake 04
Confusing bounce rate with exit rate. Bounce rate is single-page sessions. Exit rate is the percentage of sessions that ended on a specific page.
How to track it
Most analytics tools track bounce rate automatically. Look at it per page, not just for the whole site. Sort pages by bounce rate, then by traffic, to find the high-traffic pages with the worst bounce rates. That's where you should focus first.
Free tools to help
Muro built free calculators and analyzers around this metric.
Related concepts
Other terms worth learning if you're studying this one.
Common questions about bounce rate
For landing pages, 40% to 60% is good. For blog posts and reference pages, 70% to 90% is normal and not a problem. Always interpret bounce rate alongside the page's actual goal.
Speed up your page, make sure the headline matches what brought the visitor there, and add a clear next step. The biggest bounce rate killer is usually a slow page or a mismatch between the ad/link and the page content.
It usually means something is broken with tracking, or the page is so simple there's nothing to click. Investigate either way.
Bounce rate counts visitors who only saw one page. Exit rate counts the percentage of sessions that ended on a specific page (regardless of how many pages they viewed before).