A Blog Success Story
Simplifying a blog’s layout and reducing sidebar clutter drove dramatic improvement in visitor engagement.
Background
Clearing Title (www.clearingtitle.com) is a blog targeted at title insurance practitioners. In existence since 2007, it has a regular readership of real estate and title insurance professionals.
Clearing Title had become cluttered by too many sidebar “widgets” to the extent that it was most likely distracting readers from the content. In addition, the layout and typeface used by the blog’s template made articles difficult to read. We felt that Clearing Title might be losing visitors who were put off by the clutter and distraction.
Action
When migrating Clearing Title from Google’s Blogger to self-hosted WordPress we undertook a radical redesign of the blog site, focusing on the template and the sidebar content.
We selected a commercial template, The Thesis Theme for WordPress, which provided a clean layout and solid typography. As a bonus, the template provides easy configuration for search engine optimization.
After the template was installed, we carefully reviewed the function and the utility of each sidebar item. We selected only items that we felt were truly useful, and reordered them to provide the best utility.
Results
The results were dramatic. Two months after the transition, key engagement metrics had improved:
- Pages per visit up 36%
- Avg. time on site up 112%
- Bounce Rate down 25%
The results have continued to show incremental improvement, further validating the site redesign.
Recommendation
When considering a template for your blog, regardless of platform, remember it’s the content that is the most important part of equation. Pick a template that allows the content to shine through.
