Why it matters for a small business site
A high bounce rate on a page meant to win enquiries suggests it isn’t giving visitors what they expected, or a clear next step. On a page like your opening hours, though, a quick visit can mean the page did its job.
How to check yours
- In Google Analytics 4, bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that weren’t “engaged”. An engaged session lasts longer than 10 seconds, includes a key event, or has at least two page views.
- Compare pages with the same job (service pages with each other, say) rather than against a number from elsewhere.
- Look at it by device. A page that only bounces on phones may have a phone layout problem.
What good looks like
There’s no single good number: it depends on the page’s job and where its visitors come from. What matters is the trend on the pages that should lead somewhere, and whether the changes you make move it.
Common mistakes
- Comparing your figure with an “industry average” that measured something different.
- Reading old Universal Analytics figures (visits that saw one page) as if they meant the same as GA4’s.
- Treating every bounce as a failure, even on pages that answer a question in one view.
- Changing several things at once, so you can’t tell what helped.