Anyhoo, since I've been updating this blog -- one that I started with my dad years ago, before he died -- so I can submit it to Social Spark and get another blog property on there and begin getting paid to write blog posts and pages for various companies on an additional website, I've been paying it more attention lately.
That's why I was playing around with the various layouts and tweaking the website, and I kind of fell in like with the "Dynamic Views" offered within the Blogger dashboard that let me easily make this website look more professional, like the magazine view, etc.
But I noticed that when I selected a default dynamic view and click through to the Tax Daddy blog, it took awhile to load. Seconds longer than normal. And I know that in this world of down-to-the-seconds timing of website loading, people don't always wait around for a website to load till they're on to the next site, surfing on.
So I made a mental note to go back and check the traffic stats -- and today, a mere full day after I implemented the change, I see how they negatively affected traffic, therefore, I'm back to the basic template.
Notice above how this blog has been hovering around an average of 140 hits per day or so, mostly from people finding a post I wrote a long time ago about Legal Zoom referral codes, complaints and the like -- one of those posts that you write off-handedly that turns into a boon over time. (Don't you just love those?)
Even though people have written their personal complaints about the company, I still put my affiliate banners in the post to Legal Zoom, not expecting much, however, folks appreciate the honest reviews from real customers, and some of them continue on to use the Robert Shapiro-led firm for services like divorce, will creation, business formation help and similar services, and almost monthly now I've been getting a paper check in the mail for around $50 for those referrals.
Therefore, I didn't want the traffic to drop off just because of that dynamic view slowness. After all, I'm pretty sure I didn't remove the tracking code, so the drop off in traffic you see above must be all attributed to that one change -- a change that looked better visually but is nowhere near worth the loss in traffic and revenue.
Sometimes plainer is better -- until Blogger works out that slow page load issue on the dynamic view thingee. At least I saw that my mobile view wasn't turned on, so I turned it on, and here's praying that will help the pageviews even more. It's worth it to poke around and play around and learn from your blog.
1 comment:
I ran into the same issue, but there's an even worse part of it. Sometimes, the page or parts of it would fail to load at all. After digging through the code and looking for online solutions to try and patch it together, I determined it had something to do with the javascript they're using. Firebug Page Speed pointed out that nothing was being compressed properly.
Another funny story about this. Before trying out a few things, or messing with the code at all, I exported the base template as a backup. After failing to find a way to easily improve it, I attempted to reload the old template and met with a well formedness error. Ha!
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