Hi. My name is Jonathan. I am a photographer and amerture web designer. I created the site using a wordpress theme, with other plugins. Over the year I have adjusted the code many times with help from the designer in order to make it look just like I have it. My website is www.jonmphotography.com I am here because my sites bounce rate has tripled (from 15-30% to 60-70%), and the conversion rate has plummeted. This all happened once i switched from a showitfast (drag n drop) website to wordpress. I made the switch in order to get better seo. Which has helped, I now rank 1 for three great terms, and am quickly raising in new terms. I checked my site speed and it completely loads within 4 seconds, which is faster than only 31% of other sites. My top competitors site loads in 1.5 seconds and is faster than 81% of other sites. I want to get my bounce rate back down and my conversions up. I am considering getting a new theme and keeping it as simple as possible. One issue I have is that I am afraid to remove a lot of the content from my homepage since it is ranking so well on google. I don't want my site to lose its seo power. And i would love to keep all of the existing pages and posts the same. I am here to talk to people that would be able to give me better insight into what to do. Thanks, Jonathan
you got spam in your comments. Either disable comment section or install a plugin that can stop automatic comments.
i would listen to weblab and disable comments. Also while the site looks good there are some organization things that i think could help. PM me and we can discuss some tips that might do a little. Just realize as you show up more in more under some big keywords you need to realize you are a local photographer (i assume). You might be showing up in searches all over the world that could contribute. More people doesn't mean higher conversion rate. You need to work to target the right kind of traffic.
Remember - Bounce rate is the percentage of visits that only view one page. Looking at your site, there isn't an obvious "I should go here now if I want to see more" link or button. The menu is very small, and the image links at the bottom aren't obvious. The wall of text below social functions looks more like a footer disclaimer as it's in grey. Focus on funneling people through a set path in your site. Have a big linked image or example of your photography leading to a gallery or something. Make people WANT to read more.
Disabling the comments would be a good but maybe a too drastic step. If there's already a community, commenting and sharing their thoughts, it would be better to hire a moderator for those nasty spam comments.
Well it has some obvious problems that IMHO would contribute to the high bounce rate. It's fat and slow loading, mostly due to sloppy coding and the use of flash. You've got 469k of javascript loading from 23 separate files on the main page, which by my guesstimates probably doesn't need more than 10k in 1 file considering what's actually being done on that page. There are accessibility issues galore too -- the grey on the actual page content is borderline illegible, as is the use of serif fonts for screen media. It's got inaccessible fixed metric (px) fonts, and that massive image banner by definition means it's what I call "a crappy little stripe" fixed width layout -- useless to people on small screens AND large screens. If you care about visitors actually coming to your site you should have elastic fonts and layout (built in %/em's), with semi-fluid width (able to expand and shrink to fit the screen within certain limits)... and of course a responsive layout that adjusts to an even wider range of device capabilities. It's a train wreck on large screens, small screens, and mobile, and instead seems designed with the 2002 style "1024x768, **** everyone else" mentality. Under the hood it's the typical turdpress train-wreck of absurdity... illustrating quite clearly why turdpress is 'cute' for personal blogs, but has no business being used for anything professional like a business. Attributes like ALIGN, TARGET or WIDTH and tags like FONT that have no business being used in HTML any time after 1997, clearing DIV like it's still 2002, static style inlined in the markup, static widths on content elements, IE conditionals around CSS to cover up developer ineptitude, HTML5 bloat/absurdity (not a fan), endless pointless DIV for nothing, little if anything resembling a logical document structure... ... and that's before we talk the HOLY HANNAH how is that even POSSIBLE 188k CSS file... fifteen to twenty times what should be used on such a simple design. I mean, it's 1.1 megabytes total (697k compressed) in 47 files to deliver one small image slideshow and 2.34k of plaintext; easily ten to twenty times what it should be.... You mate the resulting painfully slow load time to the typical turdpress "I can haz intarnets" markup and relative failure at accessibility... It's not entirely a shocker it's bounce-heavy. Of course, you've also got that pointlessly stuffed/redundant keywords and description meta, mated to that stupid malfing "Yoast SEO" bull, which is probably dragging in visitors who don't actually care about your content -- ASSUMING it's actually doing anything relevant. (which 99% of the time it doesn't) It also proves something I've said about HTML 5 for a long time, it's carefully crafted to undo all the progress of the past decade and a half, and encourage people to sleaze out bloated 1997 style HTML 3.2; it's for the people who until recently were slapping 4 tranny around their 3.2 and calling themselves modern... now they can slap 5 lip-service (and that MIND-NUMBINGLY IDIOTIC IE CC's around the HTML tag bull Paul Irish came up with) around their decade and a half out of date code, and the W3C can put it's rubber stamp on it... Go progress :/ I would suggest pitching the whole thing in the trash and starting over. There is very little from that I'd even try to retain.