Why my new web design increased in 20% my bounce rate?

Question

I do need your help and opinions.

Last August, 1st, I have relaunched my website with a completely new design. As I have also moved it from Dreamweaver and .html format to Wordpress, the new website had also its urls changed to wordpress format, which were all duly and properly redirected using a htaccess file (already exhaustively tested and it is ok). I also keeped the same "Title" and meta description just to avoid surprises realted to traffic.

Although in my opinion, the new design is much, much more modern, clear and easy to navigate, my bounce rate in general has increased from 40%-50% (old design) to 60%-70% (new design) and the traffic started to decrease also, especially from Bing and Yahoo, since this Monday.

As I am already tired trying to figure out what could be causing this higher Bounce Rate and decrease in traffic, I do appreciate you could help taking a look at the old website design and the new one and let me know if you see anything that could justify these worse result.

Old: http://saturn.relmax.net/~easyjob/ New: http://www.easyjob.net/

Thanks in advance for your help

Answer 1

A few possibilities which may affect how Google Analytics reports bounce rate for your site:

• You stated that bounce rate "in general" has fluctuated - if you recently changed your site and have encouraged visitors to look at the new template (as you did with this post) you are inviting referrer and direct traffic bounces - try filtering for search referral bounces (if search referrals are your primary concern)
• The saturn.relmax.net and easyjob.net domains are hosted in different locations - if your site was moved from Texas hosting to New York hosting, the change in proximity could affect page load times (depending upon where most of your visitors come from)
• Your new template appears to load about 20% faster than the old template - this means that you may be catching more of the bounces which Google Analytics would not have caught in the past (Google Analytics only tracks users who stick around long enough to download the Google Analytics script and ping their monitoring servers)

The most authoritative information you will get on actual bounce rate (versus the bounce rate Google Analytics measures, which is more a measure of how long visitors stuck around after the tracking snippet phoned home) will be from your web server's logs - consider running a log analyzer on your web server's logs to determine whether the bounce rate you're noticing in Google Analytics is an actual trend or a side effect of the tracking script's operation.