Dropping Social Widget That Kills My Blog Readers Retention
One of the greatest things that social networks like MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog do is presenting a form of social proof to your visitors. We are social and seeing that someone else, perhaps even someone we know and easily recognize, provides us with a “feel good” about our action feelings.
But is it really worth it?
I’m a rather active member of the 2 social networks I have mentioned above and was proudly displaying their widgets on my blog. And for that I had suffered time and time again slow loading blog pages. It is really quite annoying when a widget placed on your blog to help you retain the visitors actually causes them to leave.
Slow loading blog makes people click away!
It is very rare that a person comes to your blog and will have enough patience to wait until pages load, especially on broadband connection. As we become more accustomed to fast Internet – slow loading pages is number 1 reason people leave. And unfortunately on way too many occasions I have noticed MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog take their sweet time to load and what is even worse completely time out during load.
According to my stats over 80% of my visitors are new to my blog, they have no idea of what information I present and no reason to wait for my blog to load for 2-3 minutes. However much I would like to believe that my content might be worth the wait – new visitors don’t know that!
People simply click away when load times are too slow …
So I have made a decision to remove the widget responsible for displaying recent visitors from 2 networks. I’ll be paying very close attention to my stats over next few days to see if this improves or damages my “average time on site” stats.
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About The Blog Author
Alex Sysoef is an IT Consultant, Internet Marketer and ProBlogger who shares his passion and knowledge of WordPress, SEO, Social Media and traffic strategies on his blog WordPress Howto Spotter. Connect on Twitter or Facebook
Alex, I noticed the same thing and it’s even more true when a blog subject about clothes, shopping or similar theme. Many visitors just not aware about social networks yet and don’t want to wait…
You piblished this post on Sep 18th, did you get any results on your test???
It seems you still keep both widgets, does it mean that test came positive for both widgets?
Max,
I think this will greatly depend on your blog audience. In my case results have shown drop in traffic from 2 networks but what is more importantly – I blog about web 2.0 and WordPress, so social participation is expected and creates “social proof”.
Removing it showed decline of participation … so its back on.
Alex