Bounce rates refer to the times a visitor leaves your website after browsing several pages. Each website has a specific bounce rate percentage, which can either be normal or not, depending on its niche. Still, if you notice an excessive bounce rate on your website, something is probably wrong.

For newbie website owners, it’s quite difficult to know if a specific bounce rate is normal or not. This leads to confusion and failure to resolve the problem.

The bounce rate range

Bounce rates vary across websites, but there are specific ranges that will tell you if you should worry or not. The following is a rule of thumb, which applies to most websites across the web.

Lower than 25% – An exceptional bounce rate

26% to 40% – A very acceptable range, your website is in good shape

41% to 55 – The average range, but can be improved

56% to 70% – A bit higher than the average range, but it can be acceptable under specific conditions

Higher than 70% – This is a big problem, and you need to fix the issue

Why does the high bounce rate happen?

High bounce rates can happen due to several reasons. The following are the leading culprits:

Poor content quality

Site visitors who are looking for information and quality content will be disappointed upon reading an inferior copy. The same goes for very salesy content that gives nothing but product pitches with no immediate value.

As much as you want to promote your product or service, you should still give something valuable to your readers. Remember that the content of your website will keep visitors coming. If it’s poor in quality and not updated, expect that the visitor will just look somewhere else.

Problematic navigation

Is your site a pain to navigate? If this is the case, you’re pushing your visitors away instead of keeping them hooked on your website. Always make sure that your pages are navigable on mobile and that all the buttons and links are working.

Also, never link to a bad or unknown site. Aside from establishing your credibility among your customers, this is also crucial in boosting your positive signals for Google rankings.

Always browse your website as if you’re a site visitor. This way, you can pinpoint what’s wrong and what you can do about it.

Very slow loading time

A slow loading time gives a bad image to your website. Worse, it directly impacts your Google rankings.

Take note that online users have a very short attention span. So if your pages take more than three seconds to load, they will just close the tab and browse the next option. With that, you experience an increased bounce rate.

It’s best to perform an audit of your website. This way, you can change things to speed up your loading time. You may also discover more problems that need to be fixed right away. You can tap the help of a web developer if you don’t have technical knowledge for this problem.