The Pros And Cons Of Optimizing For Mobile

Last week I run a poll asking people if they were used to browsing the web on a mobile device, and the result is shown below:

The results are inline with what I expected. The audience here is made of bloggers and tech-savvy people, so it’s natural that a high percentage of them use mobile devices to browse the web regularly.

What encouraged me to run that poll was an email from a reader complaining about the lack of a mobile version of my website. In a way I wanted more data before making a decision.

So will I create a mobile friendly version now that I have some numbers? Probably no, and that is because I still think the cons of doing so out-weight the pros. Consider that a mobile version of a blog is usually a screen which displays only the content of the posts, much like an RSS reader. The pros of using it are:

• The user can read your latest posts more easily.
• The readability is better.
• The pages might load faster.

And the cons:

• It becomes harder to find content other than the latest posts.
• The branding/visual aspect is lost.
• The user has less control regarding how to navigate the site.
• The user won’t see parts of your website that might be important (e.g., ads, subscription forms and so on)

If your website is relatively clean, though, and you consider that most smartphones are coming out with decent screen resolutions, you’ll see that the pros of using a mobile friendly version become less important.

For instance, many readers commented that this site displays fine on the iPhone 4, and that they don’t have problems reading the content or browsing around.

So in my opinion optimizing for the early mobile devices could have made a big difference (i.e., 2-3 years ago), but there weren’t many people using them anyway, so you could skip it. These days there are a lot more people accessing the Internet via mobile devices, but most of these devices feature good screen resolutions, allowing the users to browse websites normally. As a result, optimizing for mobile might not be that important anymore.

This is true for content based websites, at least. For service oriented ones (e.g., a social network or an online store) mobile optimization might be more critical.

Thoughts?

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What Is High, Normal And Low Bounce Rates?

In the past I already explained what is bounce rate, and why small and new websites tend to display their bounce rates incorrectly. Today I want to talk about what is considered to be high, normal and low bounce rates.

The first thing we need to consider is that every type of website will have a different ballpark number for what is considered high, normal and low bounce rates. Online forums, for examples, will naturally have lower bounce rates when compared to blogs, because people tend to read many threads on forums, while blog readers might visit the site to read a single post and move on.

The second thing to consider is the fact that a high bounce rate might not be a bad thing. If you have a website where your priority is to make money with ads, for example, you’ll want people to click on these ads, so a high bounce rate would mean you are well optimized (provided people are bouncing by clicking on the ads and not by closing their browsers’ tabs).

With that out of the way let’s talk numbers.

As far as blogs go I would say that a high bounce rate is one above 70%. It’s a high number, but that is because blogs are naturally “bouncy.” Blogs have many subscribers, and those are users who might visit the blog only to read the latest post.

If you have many ads on your blog, and making money with them is one of your priorities, then a high bounce rate might be acceptable. For example, on my other blog my bounce rate is around 82%, and I am fine with that because the CTR on my ad units is quite high.

If you don’t have many ads on your blog and your priority is to grow your traffic and audience, then your bounce rate should be between 40% and 70%, which is the normal range in my opinion.

Finally, if you have exceptionally engaging content and a very user friendly design you might get your bounce rate below the 40% mark, which I consider to be low (and therefore very good).

Over To The Readers

Defining what is high, normal and low bounce rate is always tricky. If you research around the web you’ll find all kinds of answers. That is why I wanted to ask you guys what is your bounce rate (if you know it) and what you consider or heard to be high and low bounce rates.

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Reduce Your Bounce Rate In One Second

So, how do you get visitors to spend more time on your site and reduce your bounce rate, without spending more than one second trying to do it?

It’s simple.

First of all get inside the control panel of your website (e.g., WordPress admin dashboard, or the equivalent on the software you are using). Now go to the section where you can tweak your CSS and other design aspects (in WordPress this is under the “Appearance” menu). Now find the line controlling the font size on your site, and increase it. That is it!

There are many case studies around the web where people used A/B testing to find how they could reduce the bounce rate, and increasing the font size works on most situations.

Just consider that the population in most developed countries is getting older and older, and that more and more people need to stare at a computer screen all day long for professional reasons (meaning our eyes are getting tired).

Then combine that with larger screen resolutions (where you have more pixels on the screen, but the actual appearance of the graphics gets smaller) and you get web visitors who would love to find a big large font on your site, so that they can read your awesome content comfortably.

And yes, I did increase the font on Daily Blog Tips a couple of months ago. It used to be 12, now it’s 13, and the bounce rate improved slightly.

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3 Elements of Your Blog Design That Need Simplifying

This is a guest post by John. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

WordPress is one of the most versatile blogging platforms out there with tons of options to not only customize the look and feel of the experience but also the interactions that your users have with your content.

That’s why it’s one of the most widely used platforms as well! But a constant challenge that you have is “bloating” your WordPress blog with too many features because the options are near infinite. Sometimes the best thing that you can do is simply add the elements that are the most important to your core experience for your end-user and reader and skip all the excess.

For example, some of the top blogs out there present their content first and foremost both from a stylistic perspective as well as a user-interface one. Take for example ZenHabits.net that really takes it to the extreme in terms of design.

But make no mistake about it – ZenHabits is one of the largest blogs out there and is growing and highly profitable!

So what can someone learn from ZenHabits as an archetype for good usability and a focus on the simple elements that matter? Here are 5 things that you can do to make sure you capitalize on your user’s experience and make an impact:

1.Overall Blog Design

The most obvious is the simplicity of the design. If you’re content is going to make your blog grow and attract an audience then you have to make sure that the design complements your content every single time.

Even the blog here at DailyBlogTips.com sports a simple design and structure that no one would scoff at. In fact, many people have remarked how visually refreshing it is to simply have the content first and all the other stuff second.

Make sure you use a WordPress Blog theme (I use Standard Theme) that highlights your content first so that you users can get what they came for! I feel (like you do) that your blog commenters and readers are worth it!

2. Comments

Your comment area, for many, is the lifeblood of interaction and engagement and yet it’s confusing why so many people have so many different plugins and features that crowd the comment space.

For example (and you’ve probably seen it yourself) some comment fields are so messy that you don’t know exactly where to begin! You see “calls to action” all over the place and advertisements surrounding the comment area and you’re simply not sure where the “reply” button is!

DailyBloggingTips has one of the easiest and out-of-the-box comment areas out there and this blog is doing just fine for engagement, right?

Why make it more difficult than it needs to be? The native comment box is beautiful just the way it is (and that’s why I decide to use it) but if you do choose to use another 3rd party platform it might be worth spending some time cleaning it up and simplifying those services too.

3. Social Sharing

Social networking and social media is everywhere – you simply can’t avoid it. And to a certain degree this is a great thing! You want people to engage with your content but you want even more for them to share it with their networks and with other interested parties!

But you have to make it easy to use and simply to share! Again, as I scan the many blogs that I walk through daily I see a complete mess of social sharing etiquette as there’s 20 social sharing icons (and repeats) both in the front of the blog, on the single post layer, and even near the comments!

The best option to simplify and to prettify your blog is to keep one set of social sharing icons on your single post layer (this also speeds up the front page of your blog tremendously) and do it with taste. For example, I use a persistent sharing tool that scrolls with the user unobtrusively to the side of the content so that it’s always there (but never in their way of reading the content).

Choose wisely and you will be rewarded! There are other great plugins that do this as well and another one to check out is part of the JetPack system that WordPress themselves has released.

When you spend the time necessary on making these small but effective changes you will see more people engaging with your content and even find profitable results in more traffic and perhaps even more advertising revenue as you open up space for more opportunities (and more high converting space).

About the Author: John is a professional blogger and loves all things WordPress, having released a few WordPress Themes and WordPress Plugins.

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Google’s Page Speed Service Wanna Make The Web Faster

How would you like to have Google grab all your site files, host them on a Google server, optimize the loading time with several tweaks, and then allow your visitors to visit your site directly on Google’s servers all around the world?

I sure wouldn’t mind (except maybe for the aspect of losing control).

The good news is that soon this will be possible, as Google just announced a new service called Page Speed Service. According to the announcement post:

Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.

The service is being offered to some beta testers right now, and soon it will be available for all web publishers. Right now what you can do is to run a simulation here to see how much your website would gain from Google’s service. In my case it wasn’t a huge boost. The “Page Load Time”, which is the main metric, improved by 19%.

If you like the results and to become a beta tester, though, you can apply using a link on the official announcement post (I linked to it above).

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