My stats in last month: 78.59% bounce rate 1.52 Pages/VisitI …

Comment posted on Low Bounce Rate WordPress Themes by Rarst

My stats in last month:
78.59% bounce rate
1.52 Pages/Visit

I am using free WP theme that I tweaked a lot. Since I am not much of designer I guess it doesn't capture attention of visitors who are influenced to stay by purely visual appeal. :)

Currently making (slowly) new theme (child for Hybrid framework) and what I want to try is using new taxonomies system to provide more relevant information on posts. For example for software review show list of all posts about software by same developer, for same task, etc.

Recent comments by Rarst

• How to do a full WordPress backup and restore
  I use Cobian Backup to make automatic backups from FTP. However it became really slow and unreliable when there are thousand+ of folders and files.

  Good way is to use file manager in cpanel (or whatever host uses) to pack everything into single archive and download it (just need to be careful to not create/leave it in public folder).

  I pitched around idea for WP plugin that will zip and serve such file automatically but so far no takers. :) Might get to coding it myself when my skills up to it.

• It’s time for new design
  Looks nice and... Usual for this blog I guess. :)

  Upper-right corner could use some tweaking, icons don't fit with each other and search box fails to line up with anything.

• Mind your comments, someone may be watching
  My take is actual issue here are recent comments in sidebar. They exploded single poor quality comment into site-wide problem.

  From programming perspective every single bit that comes from possibly non-safe source is heavily scrubbed and sanitized in WordPress. Neglecting to do same outside of what is possible with code can easily be recipe for such disaster.

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• SEO Super Comments
  Just installed and enabled. Issues so far:

  - no way to easily style "Comment posted on...", maybe add some class to it?
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• Presenting SEO Super Comments Concept
  @Vladimir

  Sure! I am not bashing the idea, just thinking aloud on specific aspects. :)

  On my blog I don't have terrible lots of comments but many of those are extremely extensive (longer than post they are made in response to) and valuable.

  This might be interesting to try. I am planning to make next theme as flexible as possible exactly so I can rapidly add, test and remove such features.

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See also:

• Theme Test Drive WordPress Plugin
• Tip for improving bounce rate: Ad-free homepage
• WordPress Fundamentals for Newbies