There is more to a blog’s success than the number of visitors it receives. If 90% of these visitors leave within 10 seconds after arriving, then it’s unlikely that any of these will become leads or customers. This means that your pool of potential customers is less than 10% of the total traffic to your site. Poor visitor retention can be remedied by testing the various elements on your site to see which changes have a positive effect. This is where the WordPress platform and a good WordPress developer come into play.

The WordPress platform has phenomenal flexibility in terms of controlling a website’s appearance and in controlling its behavior. You can use this flexibility to your advantage by making changes to your blog’s appearance and then studying how the changes affect visitor retention. If the changes make it worse, then go back the blog’s original appearance. If the changes improve visitor retention, then keep the changes.

Because you are using WordPress, you don’t have to be a coder to implement these changes. They can be made by clicking a few buttons, provided that you are using the right themes and plugins. Your WordPress developer can provide or suggest the best themes and plugins for your testing.

If the bulk of your visitors are leaving within a few seconds of arrival, then the problem has to do with the website’s appearance, such as the color theme, or the menu visibility. Perhaps the header doesn’t instantly tell the visitor what your business is about. The visitor that stays for only a few seconds has made a snap judgement about your site, based on what he or she sees.

Improving your visitor retention is accomplished by testing different visual and structural elements such as background colors, menu types and locations, and the number of columns on your pages. When conducting a test, change one visual element at a time, and allow a sufficient number of visitors to interact with your site before drawing any conclusions.

The most efficient way to conduct these tests, is to have your WordPress developer provide you with a theme or several themes that have lots of built-in flexibility. This will enable you or your employee to make the various changes on your own with a simple click of a button.

When you succeed in getting your visitors to spend more time hanging around your site, you can then experiment with your interactive elements, such as forms and buttons. Try changing their sizes, colors, or locations to see what combinations increase the conversion of your visitors into customers or leads. Perhaps your forms are lengthy with too many fields. You may want to test whether form length has an impact on your conversion rate. Again, your WordPress developer can provide the right plugins that will give you or your employee control over these parameters with a simple click of a few buttons.

Before spending time and money on increasing traffic to your website, you should first increase visitor retention, and optimize their conversion rate. Small changes to your site can result in a large gain in your conversion rate. Contact us today and discuss your testing plans with a WordPress developer.