Forum Moderators: DixonJones
I have a unique video game website that just started in September. It's got ~4k uniques / month. I think 43% visit duration 0s-30s is low, and want to increase visit duration.
The website itself is there for community building, and downloading the *.exe game.
I'm planning on playing around with configurations to speed up page loads.
What else should I look into?
Is there a good way to check average home page load speed? (using webalizer and awstats)
Thanks,
John
The best way I know of to figure out how to increase visit duration is to sit with individuals while they visit your site, who will "think out loud".
Do the same thing for your ads and links. If they are bringing people to your site who are expecting something else than what they are finding, they will leave right away. Tuning your ads and links can reduce the number of those people and increase the number of people with a real affinity for what you are selling - all without changing your site at all, perhaps.
Sorry to be so simplistic here, but in the end, these are the thoughts I've found most helpful in my years of experience.
47% of visits are now 0-30 seconds, but this could be because of server down time.
I tried a couple page load tests. Seems like the page loading is ~2-3 seconds average which is acceptable, and the page size is ~200 kB.
There actually is no advertising right now. It's all word of mouth and referrals from game review sites.
I will sit down with visitors and hear what they come up with. The traffic we get is all referral, so it should be pretty targeted and sticky.
Is there anything else I can try?
If that's not a mistake, then that is likely the problem right there.
Unless you ONLY want to target broadband users, a 200kb page is WAY to large.
For a dialup user downloading at say 4kb/sec, a page with a total size of 200kb will take roughly 50 seconds to download.
That just isn't going to happen. Remember dialup users still account for a pretty good majority of internet users and they will not wait around for almost a full minute for a page to load.
The reason most visits are between 0 to 30s is because that's all the time needed to go to the site and download the game. 1000 total downloads from 6,000 unique visitors seems like a pretty good ratio.
romaniucc - there are no landing pages currently. all traffic is 100% organic right now.
Philosopher - The game requires a high speed connection; dial up users cause too much latency in this multiplayer online game. However, I will minimize page size to less than 100k to decrease page load speed.
Conclusion: conversion rates are acceptable, need more eyeballs.
If I had your rates for visit lengths and percentages, I would not complain - I would dance and drink a beer to rejoice.
All in the beholder's eyes, I guess.
