16 Proven Ways To Reduce Shopify Bounce Rate

When a shopper isn’t interested in adding products to cart, you’d wonder what was so terrible about your online store.

And if you have a high bounce rate, then something must be going wrong in the customer journey. 

This post will show you what the common reasons behind a high bounce rate are and how you can reduce them on your Shopify store—it'll cover:

Why is My Shopify Store Bounce Rate So High? (20 Possible Causes)

How To Decrease Bounce Rate On Shopify

Shopify Bounce Rate - FAQs

But before we jump in, here's something to ponder about:

What is a good bounce rate on Shopify?

So for Shopify stores and websites, if the bounce rate falls between 20-45% it’s considered to be healthy.

However, eCommerce stores with bounce rates higher than 57% mean you need to start implementing some changes immediately. 

It’s also important to note that Shopify bounce rates are different for desktop and for mobile—mobile bounce rates are much higher, clocking over 50% sometimes. 

In the long run, it becomes crucial for Shopify businesses to understand the most critical factors that when taken care of leads to a healthy bounce rate:

👉 High-quality traffic: When you’re wondering how to reduce bounce rate on Shopify, it helps to remember that the quality of traffic has a direct impact on engagement & conversions - so if your paid ads and organic efforts aren’t bringing in the right audiences, they won’t find the reasons to stick around. 

👉 Smooth navigation: Be it the main menu, the way your Shopify store incorporates filtering or sorting or how easy shoppers find it to visit related product pages, a great navigation helps serious shoppers stick around for longer. 

👉 Mobile optimization: Whether it’s a Shopify store seamlessly adjusting to mobile device size parameters, CTAs appearing only around the thumb zone and images loading superfast, mobile optimization is one of the key Shopify bounce rate strategies. 

👉 Informative content: Without this feature, customers across the conversion funnel wouldn’t find the impetus to move to the next step, hampering both micro-conversions and conversions. 

👉 Timely support: Lack of FAQ answered and no immediate support can take your Shopify bounce rate a few notches higher - whereas clear info on questions shoppers usually ask and clarity on when the support team will be online reduces it.

Why is my Shopify store bounce rate so high? 

A high bounce rate on your Shopify store can be due to several factors. Here are 20 potential reasons:

1. Slow Loading Times: If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, visitors are likely to leave before engaging with your content.

2. Poor Mobile Optimization: If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, shoppers may have difficulty navigating, leading to quick exits.

3. Irrelevant Traffic: If you’re attracting the wrong audience through ads or SEO, they may not find your offerings relevant.

4. Confusing Navigation: Hard-to-find products or unclear navigation menus frustrate visitors and lead to quick bounces.

5. Lack of Clear Value Proposition: If your site doesn’t clearly communicate what you offer or why it’s valuable, visitors may leave.

6. Overwhelming Pop-Ups: Too many pop-ups or aggressive marketing tactics can cause shoppers to abandon your store.

7. Poorly Designed Homepage: A cluttered or unappealing homepage might turn off visitors, making them leave quickly.

8. No Call-to-Action (CTA): If your site lacks clear CTAs, shoppers might not know what action to take next.

9. Unattractive or Low-Quality Visuals: Blurry images or poor-quality product photos can reduce trust and interest.

10. Poor Content Readability: Small font sizes, bad contrast, or long paragraphs make content hard to read, discouraging shoppers.

11. Too Many External Links: If your site has many links leading away from your store, shoppers might get distracted and not return.

12. Lack of Trust Elements: Missing SSL certificates, badges, or reviews can make shoppers hesitant to stay or make a purchase.

13. Mismatch Between Ads and Landing Pages: If your ads or social media posts promise something different from what visitors find, they’ll leave.

14. No Social Proof: If visitors can’t see reviews, testimonials, or user-generated content, they may not trust your store.

15. Generic or Unengaging Copy: Boring or impersonal text may fail to engage visitors and convince them to stay or explore.

16. Complex Checkout Process: If shoppers see that the checkout process will be time-consuming, they may leave immediately.

17. Hidden Shipping Costs: If shipping costs are unclear or too high, shoppers may leave before engaging further.

18. Outdated Design: A dated or amateurish design can reduce credibility and drive shoppers away.

19. Not Optimized for Search Engines (SEO): If shoppers can’t find what they’re looking for quickly through search, they may bounce.

20. No Clear Product Information: If product descriptions are vague or lack key details, visitors might not stick around to learn more.

How To Decrease Bounce Rate On Shopify

Your store might be experiencing a combination of the abovementioned issues or other reasons. 

Irrespective of the reasons, here are 16 ideas on how to reduce bounce rate on Shopify.

1. Give your category section a revamp

If you’re trying to reduce Bounce Rate on Shopify:

Avoid overwhelming shoppers with too many subcategories—keep it simple and aligned with how customers shop.

Add creative and informative descriptions to your category pages that highlight product benefits, trends, or use cases.

This not only adds SEO value but also gives customers more reasons to explore.

Be sure it’s easy to find sections in one glance.

🔥 Pro Tip: Fall back on customer search trends to decide on some non-typical product categorization—for example, many clothing shoppers tend to start their search with “eco friendly…”, so having a larger “Sustainable” category on your Shopify store will make it more straightforward for such high-intent shoppers.

Shopify Bounce Rate Example - Tentree

You can easily see all sections to find the exact items you want.

2. Optimize your in-store search

As one of your Shopify bounce rate strategies, ensure they can easily get items that match their query

Use images and contextual search to highlight what the shopper might be searching for.

🔥 Pro Tip: Strike a balance between crisp and descriptive product titles, because this can help your Shopify recommendation engine fetch more precise results and reduce bounce rates. 

Shopify Bounce Rate Example -  Pretty Little Things 

Don’t forget to account for typos and alternative items when you don’t have a particular item in stock.

3. Let your CTAs stand out

Don’t just use hyperlinks or plain buttonsif your intent is to reduce Shopify bounce rate.

Use distinct colors and sizes to highlight the action you’d want them to take on that page.

Similarly, check text legibility as well as how you can personalize the CTA text for the right audience. 

🔥 Pro Tip: Choose CTA text carefully to lower Shopify bounce rate—a good way to go about this is to see which part of the customer journey you’re targeting - for example, for those at the top of the funnel, more engaging and low commitment language will work better.

4. Offer an express checkout option 

Instead of making a mandatory signup option, enable express checkout on your Shopify store. 

We recommend using popular checkout options like PayPal and Google Pay. 

This way, they won’t have another reason to bounce. 

Also, add a progress bar so they know how many steps are left to complete the purchase. 

🔥 Pro Tip: Consider introducing ShopPay as an express checkout option if you already haven’t—merchants that have adopted this feature have reported up to 50% more conversions compared to merchants who haven’t (the tool has onboarded more than 150 million shoppers since its 2017 inception).

Shopify Bounce Rate Example -  Kirrin Finch

You must also read: eCommerce Bounce Rate By Industry (+Tips To Improve)

5. Make it easy to contact support

We recommend investing in chatbots that provide answers to preset questions. 

Be sure to make it accessible everywhere on the website.

If the shopper has more questions, they can leave a detailed request that you can have a live agent help them with their shopping.  

You can also ask them to leave their contact information so you can contact them directly after that.

🔥 Pro Tip: Feature live chat FAQs that cover all the stages across your Shopify customer journey, so that bounce rates come down from people seeking critical information instantly—how Shopify business United by Blue does this is classic:

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Shopify Bounce Rate Example - Artisaire

6. Be upfront with your delivery, payment, and shipping terms

Most eCommerce stores share how much you’d have to purchase to meet the criteria for free shipping. 

However, you can also share exactly how much they’d be paying for shipping before they get to the checkout page. 

We recommend regularly updating your terms and conditions page. 

That way, you can link it, like the example below. 

Go the extra mile by creating a shipping calculator so shoppers can get an idea of how much it’ll cost without them filling out a long form at the checkout. 

🔥 Pro Tip: If you’re experiencing a high bounce rate on Shopify store, consider incorporating a separate delivery information page. This not only improves accessibility for shoppers looking for instant carrier and handling info, but also SEO, which makes the store’s visibility on Google better—a Shopify bounce rate strategy jewelry store Camille Brinch uses:

Shopify Bounce Rate Example

Check this out: How to Customize your Shopify Checkout Page: 23 Proven Ideas

7. Strategically place social proof across your store

99% of shoppers read reviews before making a purchase online. 

 It just goes to show how important having social proof on your page is—and even more so that the right placement can be an effective Shopify bounce rate strategy. 

So you should strategically place the reviews on your product pages along with the ratings and any particular tags the product has like our example below.

🔥 Pro Tip: Reduce the need to scroll as far as reviews go—whether it’s a review snippet or a link to a full reviews section, let it open up as a slider on product pages.

Shopify Bounce Rate Example

8. Use Shopify themes with an adaptive layout 

Contrary to popular opinion, you can still get free Shopify themes that will improve your store’s metrics. 

These adaptive themes are easy to edit and come with predictive search, alternative currency options, automatic discount applications and so much more. 

Some of these free adaptive Shopify themes include; Spotlight, Origin and Sense (you can browse more here).

🔥 Pro Tip: Go with your business needs to choose an adaptive Shopify layout and reduce bounce rate—for example, if your store has a large catalog, you’d do best with an adaptive theme like Turbo that features a highly mature filtering and sorting system. 

Also read: Shopify Metrics: Which Ones to Track + Ways to Improve

9. Support popular payments 

In your checkout and guest checkout sections, use popular options like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more.

Also, feature more conventional options such as credit/debit cards as well as PayPal.

Be sure to add the icons of these payment options so they are easily recognizable.

🔥 Pro Tip: Have your popular payment methods appear early in the customer journey and not wait till checkout—leverage the header, footer and the product pages to make this one of your winning Shopify bounce rate strategies.

10. Take advantage of trust signals and badges

Remember that prospective shoppers would bolt at the thought of your store being a scam.

This is why you need certain logos and badges reassuring them to continue on your website. 

You can start with badges that address their major concerns. 

For example, is there a return policy? How safe is the production process? 

Use badges like the ones below to send a trust signal.

🔥 Pro Tip: Choose the above-the-fold space for the most critical trust signals, across the site—for example, when you’re not running offers, use the notification bar to talk about your extended returns window or money back guarantee. 

Shopify Bounce Rate Example

You can also address the more obvious issues like returns, shipping, and site security. See how the same site does it below but with additional reference text.

Check this out: 9 Proven Ways to "Prevent" eCommerce Returns (+ Smart Handling ideas)

11. Optimize your overall load time 

 If you already use a responsive theme, you can be sure to have a faster load time by default.

We also recommend replacing the sliders on the hero section of your homepage with a high-resolution static image in the background.

That way, your visitors only have to wait for one image to load instead of multiple. 

We recommend starting with PageSpeed Insights to get specific improvements for your load time and reduce Shopify bounce rates in the process. 

🔥 Pro Tip:

For desktop: Use WebP format images only in the hero header—by reducing file size by at least 30%, WebP images can really reduce page load time and Shopify bounce rate too. 

For mobile: Audit your third-party apps (especially popups, reviews, and chat widgets) and use conditional loading so they don’t load automatically on mobile.

12. Limit the use of pop-ups

Ask why you want to use a pop-up at a certain juncture and if you could deliver the same message in some other way. 

In a single visit, show no more than one pop-up to reduce irritation and friction. 

Based on the customer’s journey, decide where you’d want to show this pop-up: if it’s someone who added to cart before but didn’t buy, showing a very specific discount on the cart items when they spend at least a minute on the site may be helpful. 

🔥 Pro Tip: Use only slide-in pop-ups on mobile, no matter what the message or the audience type, as it causes less friction in navigation, naturally reducing Shopify bounce rates. 

You might also like: 18 ways to make Shopify popups less annoying (+ examples)

13. Update content to help the user’s journey 

If your content isn’t helping a user move through the conversion funnel, then your Shopify bounce rate is likely to become high. 

Examples of badly optimized content? Lack of USP or UVP on the homepage, no expectation setting on what a category is about on a category page and little or no info on product pages. 

🔥 Pro Tip: No matter which piece of content you’re updating (whether it’s a product description or a section on the blog), always focus on advice that’ll answer “What’s in it for me?” as a key Shopify bounce rate reduction strategy.

Do read: Why Is Your Shopify Conversion Rate Low?

14. Set the layout to the F scanning pattern

Though it’s been 17 years since it was first discovered that web audience read in an F scanning pattern, the observation still holds true. 

And if you want to keep your Shopify bounce rate low, you’d optimize for this scanning pattern. 

Ways to do it?

Keep the most valuable information above the fold. 

Reduce the use of text for later scrolls and instead use more images. 

Highlight the most important words and phrases. 

🔥 Pro Tip: Use heatmap tools like LuckyOrange to check if user scanning patterns actually match your layouts during sessions. 

15. Add social proof across the site

And when you’re trying to reduce your Shopify bounce rate, you also need to focus on what kind of social proof would work best for which page. 

For example, while detailed reviews are ideal for product pages, for the homepage it’s ideal to either pick logo mentions or quote snippets from press mentions. 

🔥 Pro Tip: Match the display of social proof to where the customer is when you’re trying to reduce bounce rate in Shopify—for example, on technical products, highlight expert testimonials and technical validation.

16. Keep your forms short 

Up to 8 form fields is what’s mostly acceptable for eCommerce forms. 

However, when you’re attempting to keep your Shopify bounce rate in check, you’ll also have to use autosuggest and autofill wherever necessary. 

For mobile, apply HTML mobile input types instead of form fields to make keying in dates and numericals easy. 

🔥 Pro Tip: Pay special attention to optimizing form submission times and clear feedback on what stage of the submission the shopper is—leverage microcopy to do this effectively. 

Recommended reading:

24 Shopify marketing strategies to build a 6-figure business (+ examples)

40 Shopify product page templates (+ stunning real-world examples)

22 Shopify product page mistakes that drive customers away

Shopify landing page design: 22 amazing examples + proven ideas

Shopify Bounce Rate - FAQs

1. What is “Bounce Rate”?

According to Shopify, bounce rate is the percentage of shoppers who visit one page on your eCommerce store and leave without taking any action.

This action could be clicking a link, checking out the products on your page, signing up for your newsletter, signing up for your store or even making a purchase. 

So what your bounce rate does is tell you how often these website visitors leave after viewing a single page. 

2. How to calculate bounce rate?  

To calculate your bounce rate, you’d have to collate the total number of website visitors that viewed a single page, divide them by the total number of your website visitors, and multiply the result by 100. 

Here’s a formula you can use:

(Visitors who viewed a single page / Total number of store visitors) X 100

3. Which reasons contribute to high Shopify bounce rate the most?

When stores come to us asking how to reduce bounce rate in Shopify, we deep-dive to check on the 5 following factors first:

👉 Lack of a value proposition: Even if your Shopify store has a large catalogue, shoppers expect to know what your brand does differently or why exactly they should explore a limited time offer.

👉 Poor quality traffic: This often means lots of people are coming into the store but have poor intent to engage or buy, making them drop off earlier even if other optimizations are in place.

👉 Under-optimized homepage design: As the first point of contact with your brand, the homepage has to work as a mini site, without which Shopify bounce rates can drastically increase.

👉 Weak CTAs: Vague terms and generic actions often lead to shoppers doubting if they should keep engaging with your Shopify store. 

👉 Badly timed pop-ups: No one wants to see a “15% off on your first order” the minute they land up while they’re still adjusting to the offers and recommendations. 

4. How to maintain a healthy Shopify bounce rate?

While there are lots of optimizations that a store can carry out to maintain a healthy Shopify bounce rate, the 5 foundational elements that need more attention are:

✔ Prioritize above-the-fold content loading: The key metric: achieve First Contentful Paint in under 1.8 seconds. Studies show that each 100ms improvement in load speed can reduce bounce rates by up to 7%.

✔ Restructure navigation for mobile:The most effective approach uses prominent category cards instead of traditional dropdown menus, with thumb-friendly tap targets (minimum 44×44 pixels). 

✔ Stop making generic sitewide offers: Make these offers product-category specific rather than site-wide to increase relevance. This technique can recover up to 15% of otherwise lost visitors.

✔ Identify “attention hot zones”:  Position your highest-converting elements within these zones. Particularly effective is placing social proof elements (like review counts) directly adjacent to price points, creating a psychological value anchor that can reduce price sensitivity by up to 20%.

✔ A/B test the most critical elements: Establish a rolling 2-week testing cycle focusing on one key page element per cycle (headlines, CTAs, hero images, etc.)

5. How to find Shopify bounce rate?

Shopify has made it possible to find your bounce rates in the analytics section.

To check the bounce rate on your current Shopify store, here’s what to do; 

Log in to your Shopify store

Visit your profile and under the analytics section located at the left side of your screen, tap on “Reports”

Scroll to acquisition and then click on “Sessions over time”

Select the date you’d want to view your bounce rates and then scroll down

Tap on “Edit column” and then select “Bounce rate” from the drop-down

You’ll get the details of your current bounce rates and then work on improving the figures you get.

How A/B Testing Can Improve Shopify Bounce Rate

Making drastic changes overnight can significantly affect your conversion rates—especially if they don’t sit well with your existing users.

A/B testing is a safer way to identify what works and what doesn’t. 

You don’t have to compromise on what already converts in the hopes of reducing your bounce rates.

After testing with a select few, you can choose to launch it for the whole store if it works or revisit your hypothesis if it doesn’t. 

Before you go…

98% of visitors who visit an eCommerce site—drop off without buying anything. 

Why: user experience issues that cause friction for visitors. 

And this is the problem ConvertCart solves. 

We've helped 500+ eCommerce stores (in the US) improve user experience—and 2X their conversions. 

How we can help you: 

Our conversion experts can audit your site—identify UX issues, and suggest changes to improve conversions.