Exit rate is the percentage of sessions that ended on a specific page, regardless of how many pages the visitor viewed before leaving.
If 500 sessions included a visit to your pricing page and 150 of them ended there, the exit rate for that page is 30%. The visitor may have come from your homepage, browsed several pages and then left from pricing. Or they could have gone directly to pricing and left immediately. Both count as exits.
That distinction is what separates exit rate from bounce rate, and understanding it is what makes exit rate actually useful.
Key takeaways
- Exit rate measures how often a specific page is the last page viewed in a session
- Unlike bounce rate, exit rate includes visitors who viewed multiple pages before leaving
- A high exit rate on a thank-you or confirmation page is completely normal and expected
- High exit rate on a key conversion page like checkout or pricing signals a potential problem
- Every session ends somewhere. Exit rate just tells you where
How to calculate exit rate
The formula:
Exit rate = (exits from a page ÷ total visits to that page) × 100
An “exit” is counted when a visitor leaves your site from that page. “Total visits” includes every time the page was loaded in any session, whether the visitor arrived there first or fifth.
Example: your checkout page was visited 800 times last month. In 240 of those sessions, it was the last page the visitor viewed. Exit rate = 240 ÷ 800 × 100 = 30%.
Exit rate vs bounce rate
These two metrics get confused constantly. The key difference:
Bounce rate counts sessions where the visitor viewed only one page total and left. The page they landed on is also the page they exited.
Exit rate counts sessions that ended on a particular page, regardless of whether it was the only page viewed.
| Scenario | Bounce? | Exit? |
|---|---|---|
| Visitor reads one blog post and leaves | Yes | Yes |
| Visitor browses 3 pages, then leaves from contact page | No | Yes (for contact page) |
| Visitor lands on homepage, clicks to about, clicks to pricing, leaves | No | Yes (for pricing page only) |
Every bounce is also an exit. But not every exit is a bounce.
Bounce rate is most useful at the traffic level, understanding what percentage of your overall traffic left without engaging. Exit rate is most useful at the page level, understanding which specific pages are ending sessions.
When high exit rate is fine
Not all high exit rates signal problems. Some pages are designed to be the last stop.
Thank-you pages. After a purchase or form submission, visitors land on a confirmation page and leave. This page should have a near-100% exit rate. If it doesn’t, something is broken in your flow.
Contact or booking confirmation pages. Same logic. The visitor completed what they came to do.
Blog posts and glossary entries. Visitors who arrive from search, read the article and leave are doing exactly what the page was designed for. A 70% exit rate on a blog post is often healthy.
External link pages. If your page’s goal is to send visitors to a partner site or external resource, people leaving is the desired outcome.
High exit rate becomes a problem when it appears on pages where you expect visitors to continue deeper into your funnel.
When high exit rate signals a problem
These are the pages where high exit rate deserves investigation:
Product pages with high exit rates. If visitors are landing on a product page and leaving without adding to cart, something isn’t working: product images, pricing, page speed or trust signals.
Cart and checkout pages. The further into checkout a visitor gets before leaving, the more concrete the problem. High exit rate at the payment step often points to payment friction, unexpected costs (shipping) or trust issues.
Pricing pages. If visitors land on your pricing page and leave without clicking a plan or contacting you, the pricing structure, value communication or call to action isn’t landing.
Onboarding steps. For SaaS tools or products with a setup flow, a page where most users drop out points to the step that needs simplifying.
The pattern to look for: a page that should be a throughput page (people passing through it) is acting as an exit page. That gap is where you focus.
How to use exit rate in practice
On its own, a single exit rate number tells you almost nothing. It gets useful when you:
Compare it to session context. A 40% exit rate on a page that’s usually the last step before conversion is a problem. A 40% exit rate on a blog post in the middle of a content cluster is probably fine.
Segment by traffic source. Visitors from email might exit from your pricing page 20% of the time. Visitors from a broad paid campaign might exit 60% of the time. The traffic source tells you whether the intent mismatch is on your side (bad page) or the acquisition side (wrong audience).
Look at the pages before it. High exit rate on page 3 of your checkout is only useful if you also know that most visitors who reach page 3 came from a specific product category. That pattern might point to a problem with how that category sets expectations.
In practice, I find that exit rate is most useful as a diagnostic tool after you’ve spotted a revenue or conversion problem elsewhere. If your cart abandonment rate is high, then checking exit rate across your checkout funnel steps tells you exactly which step is losing the most people.
Exit rate in WordPress analytics
Burst Statistics shows exit rate in the Pages report alongside sessions, pageviews, bounce rate and time on page. You can see at a glance which pages are ending the most sessions and compare them against each other.
Because Burst stores data locally on your WordPress site, your funnel analysis stays on your server. No third-party receives your visitor behaviour data.
FAQs
There’s no universal good exit rate. It depends entirely on the page type and where it sits in your visitor journey. A blog post might run 60–80%. A product page might run 30–50%. A checkout completion page should run close to 100%. Compare each page against what you’d expect given its purpose.
Not as a goal in itself. Some pages should have high exit rates. Focus on reducing exit rate specifically on pages where you need visitors to take a next step but they’re leaving instead. Reducing exit rate on your checkout page is worth effort. Reducing it on your thank-you page is meaningless.
Maybe. The question is: what happens in the 35% of sessions that continue? If those visitors are going to your checkout or contact page and converting well, then your pricing page is working as a filter. If the 65% who exit never return and never buy, it’s worth examining the page. Check which traffic sources have the highest exit rate there, that often reveals the mismatch.
They’re often used interchangeably. Drop-off rate tends to refer specifically to exits within a defined funnel (like a checkout flow), while exit rate is more general and applies to any page. In Burst, you’ll see exit rate across all your pages; funnel analysis is done through goal tracking.
Find where visitors are leaving
Exit rate tells you which pages are ending sessions. Burst Statistics shows your page-level exit data directly inside WordPress, alongside sessions, bounce rate and conversion data. All on your own server.
Analytics that tell you what actually matters
Track exit rate, goal funnels and the metrics that move your site forward. No cookie banner. No data sent to Google.
For more on the metrics that surround exit rate, see what is bounce rate and see what is a session.
