Lately I’ve been tweaking a lot of things on my sites to try to make the sites more ‘sticky’. I want people to stay around a bit longer and view a few more pages before they leave. Here are 3 things that have made a difference.
Changed Related Posts Section
I moved my Related Posts section to a higher position on the page, made the font for the title larger in size and made them more relevant. Using the YARPP plugin for WordPress, I was able to tweak the related posts section for each article and make them more attractive for visitors.
Changed Sidebar Titles
This tip I got from Tim Ferriss. I suggest you watch his presentation below. It makes it clear that little changes such as sidebar titles can increase clicks on the links below them. For example, I used to have a column in the sidebar labeled “Categories”. After changing it “Topics”, my click-rate on the section increased nearly 2%. I never believed such little changes could make such a difference, but they really do.
Increased Speed
I didn’t think much about making my website fast. I have a fast Internet connection and pretty much thought everybody did. That’s totally not the case. Many people use DSL and dial-up still. Those people leave if your site takes 20 seconds to load a page. I use the PageSpeed FireBug add-on to check what scripts are loading on my pages and to find out what I need to optimize.
With these 3 things alone, I was able to increase my pageviews from 1.2 per person, to 2.2. I’ll keep searching for more tweaks that work. Feel free to share your own in the comments section below.