Refreshing Problem on Website

One of my websites (not this one) has some sort of unidentified bug that is causing it to load and then reload part of the site before completing the load.

This normally wouldn't be a problem, but it's causing some reporting errors with Google Analytics. In particular, it's showing a bounce rate of 0.68%. The bounce rate was about 80% before February 20, so the problem (probably) started then.

And, of course, it's causing the site to load more slowly, as a whole, possibly costing the site its readership.

I went through the template and made some changes, removing some redundancies (there were a LOT of them) and I also removed Blogger's "share this around the internet" stuff, since I have a third party script that does the same thing. Since un-checking the box didn't remove it, I removed the offending code from the xml file.

I also removed and reinserted the GA code in the case that it had been put in wonky -- it'll be several hours before I am able to look at the logs and tell if my bounce rate is going up to a more realistic (sadly) number.

However, I can say that now the site is loading much faster. I also cut down the number of blog posts on the front page from four to two; moved my 'about', 'contact', and 'privacy' pages from blog posts to actual pages (as when the site was created, Google didn't have "pages" on Blogger.)

I also changed the ads from being little squares in the post, to small banners between the title and the post. While this area doesn't convert quite as much as in the corner where they were, it looks a ton better.

In the past, I'd put some text in the sidebar to help the ads become more "relevant" to the topics of the blog, but those two mini-articles to the footer and wrote a third on the footer. It sounds like it would look horrible, but it looks really spiffy.. I'm quite proud of it as the third article I added seems to help prevent the ads from being kind of off-the-wall and more relevant than with just the two articles. Also, it looks a lot nicer overall.

So loads fast + looks better + ads are more relevant... let's see how this converts.

Posted in: web development