I’ve been doing some quasi-testing on different blog layout styles to see what kind of layout converts better. The two styles I’ve been testing are the “magazine” style layout like and the traditional style layout like the one that this blog uses.

I wanted to test out the magazine style layout because I liked the idea of a blog looking more like a traditional high-end website, while still being able to use the traditional wordpress content management. Wordpress makes it sooo easy to manage your content… I love that!

Before I get into the test results, I want to make it clear that I hadn’t really planned to test this because it didn’t occur to me that using either of these blog layouts would make THAT much difference. After all, both types were professionally designed and looked pretty good.

In fact, I didn’t expect there to be any difference at all… then I started comparing the site stats for each layout type over several different niches.

The bounce rates were significantly different!

The magazine style blog layout averaged a bounce rate of 76.06%

The traditional blog layout average a bounce rate of 11.51% (This blog currently has a 11.42% bounce rate)

Just to give you some background… experts indicate that non-blog websites should aim for a bounce rate of under 30% and blogs for a bounce rate under 50%.

Also keep in mind that I only compared different blogs in the same niche with roughly the same traffic so that the comparison would be as accurate as possible.

According to my results, the traditional style blog layout with a series of blog posts in chronological order is far more sticky and encourages blog visitor to visit many more pages of the website than the magazine style layouts do.

As you might imagine, I’m now furiously working to convert all my magazine layouts to traditional blogs… but before you start doing the same you should run some of your own tests to see if your results are similar.

My results could be a fluke, especially since I didn’t really plan to test them for bounce rates in the first place!

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Filed under: Testing & Tracking

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