One of our ongoing priorities at BuildZoom is enhancing the user experience, making it easier for people to find reliable contractors. There are a lot of metrics we examine to help better understand the impact of changes we make to the site. One of the more important numbers we look at is the average time that users spend on BuildZoom.

Improving metrics is typically an incremental process – you tweak something on the site and see a slight increase (or decrease). For a large content site like ours that receives hundreds of thousands of visitors monthly, small changes can have a big impact.

In August, we rolled out a feature that more than doubled the average visitor time-on-site.

It started with a general sense that there was too much text on a typical page.

The original page

We decided to make the page more visually appealing and since we had thousands of beautiful photos of work, submitted by our users, we decided to add a widget to the site that would let visitors easily browse examples of remodeling work in their area.

We were surprised when we saw the time-on-site more than double, from an average that had been about 1 minute per visitor, to about 2.5 minutes per visitor.  When you consider that in a typical month, we can have over 300k visitors to the site, you can imagine why we would have been both excited and surprised by the result.

The increase was so dramatic that we wanted to double-check the results before sharing our findings, so we took the widget down for a day and the time-on-site instantly dropped.

After the second test, we felt confident enough in our findings to share our results.

People are visual.  Regardless of how much relevant information you provide, sharing it in a visually pleasing manner will make a difference.  This particular situation was extremely high impact but we’ve seen on numerous occasions, that our visitors respond positively to changes that are aimed at improving the look-and-feel of the site.

At the same time, you always need to consider relevance.  We made sure that the photos were localized and also front-loaded the higher quality images to create a better viewing experience.

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