What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who arrive on a page of a website and then leave without clicking a link, opening a second page, or taking any action the site can measure. Analytics tools report it per page, and different tools count it in different ways.
Why it matters to a shop
Someone searched for a shop like yours on a phone, tapped your link, and was gone in four seconds. That is a bounce, and it is a customer who was already looking for you. When it happens on the pages people arrive at most — the home page, the opening hours page, one product — it usually means the single thing they came for was not on the screen: the address, the price, the phone number, or a photo of what you actually sell. The number does not tell you the site is bad. It tells you which page to open on a phone and look at honestly.
How to read your own bounce rate
- Look at it page by page, never as one site-wide figure. A page that answers a single question — your opening hours — will always look bad by this measure, because the visitor got the answer and left satisfied.
- Open the page you are worried about on your own phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, and use the published address rather than the editor preview. Start counting. If the business name, what you sell, and a way to contact you are not visible within the first screen and a few seconds, you have found the cause.
- Change one thing, then wait two to four weeks before judging it. Move the phone number, the booking button, or the address to the top; publish again; compare the same page against the same stretch of last month. Change five things at once and you will never know which one worked.
Common mistake: Treating one number as a grade for the whole site. Tools define a bounce differently — some count a visit as engaged once it passes a set number of seconds or a scroll — so a figure from one tool cannot be compared with a figure from another.