It’s official. I drank The Thesis Theme Kool-Aid. And damn does it taste good.
It only seemed right that since I’m writing ebooks on how to make Thesis better, making Thesis Theme skins for internet marketers, and pimping Thesis Theme coupons, that I should at least practice what I preach and run the theme here.
Now of course there are thousands of WordPress themes out there and maybe Thesis isn’t for you. There are plenty of reasons why many sensible people wouldn’t want the Thesis Theme. (For one thing, it’s freaking HARD to modify Thesis to do some simple tasks if they aren’t common practice) But for a TON of WordPressers, Thesis is simply the bomb.
And I’m going to show you why…
As much as I make fun of Google Analytics, I do use it and want to show you some of the drastic changes that have happened since I switched to Thesis.
{Note: These images compare a couple of stats that I consider pretty damn telling of how usable a theme is… bounce rate and pageviews per visitor. Keep in mind that the previous theme was no stranger to usability. It’s not like we went from something God awful to Thesis… the original wouldn’t win a beauty contest but it got it’s share of compliments too. I digress…}
Bounce Rate Since Moving to Thesis:
- The bounce rate dropped to 3.34% and then 0% so far today because of The Thesis Theme.
You can all laugh as much as you want at how horrible my bounce rate was before, but nobody can talk trash about 0%. Yeah, as of today not one person has bounced on this site. (Don’t even try to be the first!)
Pageviews Per Person Since Moving to Thesis:
Pageviews went through the roof. Does your site average 5 pages per visitor? Well mine didn't either till now.
Pageviews went absolutely through the roof. The line says it all.
Conclusion:
Thesis is amazing at keeping people on your site. It’s just easy to use.
If you want to try Thesis, then by all means make sure to get all this free stuff when you buy it.
If Thesis doesn’t improve your users’ experience, you can hold me personally responsible. But I’m pretty darn confident that you are going to get results like those above. “Good” is what we call those.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
What’s so special about Thesis that could have caused these stats to change?
It could be a lot of things. Personally I think it has to do a lot with the layout. People see Thesis around a lot and they know how to make their way around the site easily. I’d also like to think it has a lot to do with the new sidebar images that stand out a lot and encourage people to click on them, too.
A lot of people want their website to “stand out” or “be unique”. Unfortunately, if you get too unique then it can be difficult for people to navigate and as a result you lose that visitor.
What do you think? Do you like Thesis?
Brad
Brad,
I like Thesis.
But I wonder about the conclusions you are drawing from your recent experience with it. Looking at your two graphs I see a trend starting before your switch to Thesis and continuing for one or two days. It’s a little hard to tell because I get a different impression of your switch date from the two–21st from the first, 22nd from the second. I also wonder if your analysis takes any trends from further back than the previous week. I would want to consider more data, but you didn’t provide it for me. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just wondering about your analysis.
Despite the doubts I just expressed I was interested enough see what else you’ve posted about recently and I read your post about Google Analytics. Your reference to making fun of it didn’t get me to click, but once I read the post I found that description to be misleading. Not fun making but usefulness knocking, I’d say. So if I find that post persuasive, doesn’t it refute your argument here? Which should I believe?
Walter,
You make some great points, and I was well aware of the irony of using Google Analytics to make a claim while linking to an article dissing its usefulness. I’m impressed you noticed that too!
OK, so to answer your questions…
@Looks like the trend was already emerging on its own:
This was because the switch to Thesis wasn’t made at midnight. In fact, to make things even worse, I had be switching back and forth between the old theme and Thesis for a couple of days. The arrow in the images shows *about* where Thesis was the main theme being shown to visitors. Basically if you were to look at my stats for the last 3 months you would see a flat line and then the drop when Thesis started being shown for both pageviews and for bounce rate. I agree that was a bit confusing.
@Not making fun of Analytics:
Once again, you are right on. Google Analytics is great for some things but too damn complex for most people. Usefulness knocking is a great way to describe it.
-Brad
Thanks for the quick reply. I didn’t consider that the upgrade would be gradual, but it makes perfect sense as you describe it.
My reactions are:
1. Do your regular visits browse your site more after they see your theme has changed?
2. I wonder what http://www.clicktale.com/ or http://userfly.com/ show your users doing… where on the page(s) are they following links that cause such a low bounce rate?
3. Congratulations!
Great points. I hadn’t looked at those metrics…
I’ll check them out and then post the results here.
Thanks Brian,
Brad
Your banners/buttons in the sidebar does draw a lot of attention to them, so I’d agree that many people probably click those
It’s quite an impressive graph, well, both of them. In my case, it has actually gotten a bit worse since I switched to Thesis. But it could also be the fact that my daily pageviews saw a 3-500% increase compared to usual, because I wrote two posts that received a ton of search engine traffic related to that particular problem, so the user came, they saw, they fixed their problem, they left. They got what they came for – so actually, it’s my own fault – I should have linked to the solution on another page I guess
(PS: Where’s your “subscribe to comments”-plugin, so I will get an e-mail if/when you reply to this post? Now I haven’t got a clue if it will happen and I might very well forget to come back and check
)
Klaus,
Yes, my bounce rata always goes through the roof on posts like that… or if you hit the front page of digg, reddit, etc. The traffic spike is still good though!
I’ll add the subscribe to comment plugin… thanks for the suggestion.
Best, Brad
It’s impossible for a theme to have caused such a significant change.
You have the analytics code in your site twice. This causes every single user to count as two which drops the rate to zero.
Delete the code you added in the Thesis control panel and you will see the bounce return to its original rate.
I know because it happened to me.
Sorry to rain on your parade.
Jason,
You are exactly right man. Thanks for the note!
Brad
No problem.
I just checked your code and it’s in the Ultimate Google Analytics plug-in as well.
I was pretty stoked about my drop as well but then I thought “There’s no way people find me THAT interesting…”
I had mine in Thesis and Headspace. I deleted one and my rate returned to 80% or so.
Now I have to actually work to get people to stick around. Lame.
This is so funny- I made some changes to my site, wrote a couple articles that blew up, and was rewarded with a near-zero bounce rate. At first, I drew the same conclusion- people like me! It didn't dawn on me until a bit later that Google must be counting each person twice somewhere along the way.
Oh well. I think 80% is great by the way. Even using excerpts on my home page it still takes some coaxing to invite people in to click around and enjoy.