Answer: none. Using Visual Website Optimizer on my blog, I tested the layout of sidebar to see if it has any effect on bounce rate. Particularly, I tested whether the sidebar in right (default on many blogs) works better than the sidebar on left. The answer for my case turned out to be that it doesn’t really matter. (Though it may differ for you – you should A/B test it, it is really quite simple). Here are the versions I tested:
Control – Sidebar on the right (click to expand)
Variation – Sidebar on the left (click to expand)
Both versions had surprisingly similar engagement rate of around 22%. Engagement rate is inverse of bounce rate, so in a way this means , irrespective of sidebar positioning, bounce rate of my blog remains 78% (quite high, by the way). If you want to see actual results, here they are (click to expand):
Since the test involved changing the layout of blog across all posts, if you are curious that this would have involved digging into Wordpress or PHP code – the answer is no. In fact, the took just 5 minutes to implement. Using the advanced code mode of VWO, all I did was to define the Left Sidebar variation with this CSS: #sidebar { float: left; }. Yes, just that! VWO took care of the rest.
