About a month ago, I took a good look at my site, compared it to others, and went crazy with the delete button. I also brought a couple items back to life. Here is what I did a month ago that has made: my page views increase by 27%, pages per visit increase by 12%, my bounce rate decrease by 1%, and an increase in my average time on site per session by 56%!

Usually it’s better to make small measurable changes to a site, but enough was enough. My site needed a bigger change. It needed a change at least for me.

What I Did

I took a good look at my delete button, and then put it to work.

Got Rid of The MyBlogLog Widget

Getting rid of the MyBlogLog Widget served two purposes. It rarely got clicked, and it didn’t encourage more followers, so bye bye. The visitors didn’t need it, so neither does my site. The second reason to remove it was to eliminate just another javascript from loading. It helped speed up my site load time. End results? Faster page loading, less off site distractions from my website.

Got Rid of the Follow Me On Twitter Image

Twitter is too time intensive for me. If you want to follow me, use my RSS feed. I personally believe it is far more effective to follow a well trained thought, than follow sporadic mini blog posts that have a maximum character allowance of 140. Many tweets get missed entirely. This is one reason I made my Twitter Toolbar, to keep a history of tweets so it’s easy for you to retweet that same thing. Again, back to being too time intensive. Deleting this reduced site load time (one less image and a little less code), and one less off site distraction.

Made Related Posts More Visible

On the post pages, I made the related posts links more visible by moving them up. Watching user action, I’ve seen little difference, but visitor engagement time is up so it may have helped. Hover over their links time went up slightly.

Enhanced My Number One Landing Page

My Twitter Toolbar page is the biggest draw to this site, and though visitors were downloading, they were also leaving. A few quick fixes to that page lead to a 25% decrease in bounce for that particular page.

Moved the Previous and Next Post Links to Top of Post

Similar to the related posts links it had little effect. The change was only a 3% increase in use. It was an  improvement at least.

Moved Archive Link From Left Sidebar To Top Menu

This was a big deal, and equaled an 86% increase for page views for that particular page.

Changes To Layout

This is what started the whole thing for me. I was sick of the menu background. Black with stripes. Yuck. The blue is strong, bold, and  simply makes it look a lot cleaner. It is easier on the eyes for sure. I then added recent comments, and recent posts to the left sidebar.

I additionally made a few minor layout changes in regards to spacing. Adding everything up it was easily well worth my time and efforts.

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