The Google Analytics data for my new design

Just making a redesign and study the changes

[jetteroheller]

I just changed some of my sites to a new design.

What I do not understand,

the average number of pages viewed increased about 10%

the average time reported for one visit decreased about 10%

Any ideas about this?

[simonuk]

Google likes your new content but the visitors do not?

[caribguy]

Ah, the pitfalls of engineering a brave new world ;) /jk

simonuk might be right: does your content answer the visitor's question? Perhaps they try clicking on a few more links to see where you're hiding the goods, and then give up....

I'd suggest to monitor your new / return visitor rates for the next month.

[simonuk]

There is a very fine line in design between good content and bad content, sometimes even a couple of words are enough to drop visitors.

Googles website optimiser allows you to run A/B testing which I use a lot to see how a change affects the site without any long term impacts.

[jetteroheller]

Somebody gave me a simple answer

"Maybe the visitor discovers faster, that he does not like the site"

I made a load time optimzation moving a javascript load from the head to the end.

So the content displays much faster.

Old layout:

Load head 2kb
javascript 18 kb
style sheet 4 kb
start showing the first part of content

New layout

Load head 2 kb
style sheet 2 kb
start showing the first part of content

On 2 sites tested, the average number of page views per visit increased 4%.