Paul Olyslager is a UX designer from Belgium with a focus on data driven design. He wanted to test the impact of removing the publication date of his blog post – since he had also some older post on his blog.
Hypothesis
Removing the publication date will reduce the bounce rate of the article as visitors might think the content is no longer relevant.
Results
The variation beat the control:
The bounce rate dropped +14% (12% absolute) from 84 % to 72%.<
Learnings
Some visitors may think that content is less to be trusted when there is no publication date. In fact Paul received an email from a visitor about that. On the other hand the content may seem less relevant. The latter effect proved larger for Paul.
There is also the impact on search listing. If an date appears in the SERP it might result in less visits from Google.
Test details
| Test element |
Copy
|
| Page type |
Blog post |
| Test date |
January 2012 |
| Tested by |
Paul Olyslager |
Website information
