Almost two weeks ago I launched a test theme to see if color theory improves websites. My color theory experiment worked in my Etsy shop and it increased my sales dramatically, but it had a little bit of a different effect on my website.
In this graph, the orange represents the design I had prior to the change. The colors are my signature theme, coral and grey. The blue represents the new theme colors, which are blue and green. You can see two days before I switched the theme, that my stats didn’t change much. My website was already growing with the coral and gray theme.
You can click the images to see a bigger picture.
Another part of my segments was my return visitor rate. It dropped. My lovely return visitors don’t like change.In this view, I still averaged the same amount of visitors every 10 days. My Unique Visitors grew, but it wasn’t related to the change in my theme. Google actually bumped up one of my pages to rank #1 which resulted in more traffic. So while my return visitors decreased, the visits stayed the same because I had more unique visitors coming to the blog thanks to Google’s page rank increase.
The new visitors also stayed on the blog a little bit longer, but they didn’t find what they were looking for, which resulted in my bounce rate to increase.
The increase in Google traffic resulted in some more pages being viewed. Or, one page being viewed more than usual.
My final conclusion is that certain colors that are used in marketing to increase sales do not have the same effect to increase blog readers and traffic. Readers will continue to read no matter what colors, as long as it’s easy on the eyes overall. And readers will stay if your theme is attractive.
That’s why I only did my color theory test for 10 days. Everytime I saw the blue and green logo, I hated it. I missed my signature colors. I also want to make the next move in my business plan and I can’t do that until my signature color returns. This is why the blog looks as it did before, but slightly better, and back to the original idea before I tried to separate business from life. I believe the new design keeps my brand alive, and it also tells the story of what goes on behind my business. For example, home and life.
