How not to design a blog
Lauren Holliday
Full-stack marketer
Your blog can be an incredibly important part of your site, driving traffic, converting leads, and giving you a voice in the industry. But if you’re doing any of the following with your blog’s design, you could be shooting yourself in the foot.
For the majority of blogs, dwell times — the average time visitors spend on a site — are abysmally low, averaging a mere 59 seconds. Given that the average dwell time for a top 10 Google result is around three minutes, the average blog won’t be ranking, and thus driving traffic, anytime soon.
Why are dwell times so low?
Most blogs — especially media publications — leave you feeling overwhelmed, confused, annoyed, or all of the above. All in less than 59 seconds!
Be honest: How much time can you spend on Forbes before having an anxiety attack?
Forbes: popups on top of popups.
For me, it’s well under 59 seconds — I don’t usually get past the quote of the day, if I click through at all. While your blog may not be as bad as Forbes’, you may be scaring off visitors before they get a chance to fall in love with your content.
Let’s take a look at the common worst practices of blog design — what not to do — with real-world examples.
Force me to click, click, click to get where I want
It’s annoying when a blog post is broken into multiple pages — clicking the tiny numbered links sours the experience.
HubSpot breaks long pages into multiples, forcing users to click, click, click.
Infinite scroll with a “load more” button is a good option. Something similar to what RateGravity is doing.
Make me squint to read your content
If I’m straining to read, I’ll skim and bounce. Blogs should take inspiration from Quartz at Work.
Disincentivize sharing your content
The overwhelming majority of blogs make sharing hard. They place share buttons at the top and/or bottom of a post.
Let your text stretch as wide as the screen
Bring on the wall o’ text!
Visitors rarely read word-by-word on the web. Instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.
Only link to your own content
A surefire way to kill your credibility with me is to never link to trustworthy third-party sources.
Distract me with your sidebar
Sidebars are exactly that, supplementary content.
Definitely hide the author’s identity
Keep me guessing how long a post is
Make it super-hard to subscribe
Do (I repeat: do) optimize your blog design if you’re doing any of the above
I'm also a huge advocate for the user — if your design facilitates users having an amazing experience on your blog, they will return.