So up until recently I’ve been a proponent of multi-page posts for magazine developers. I figured, if you are struggling to monetize your magazine, what better way to do that then to get people onto more pages. It increases your pageviews and, as a result, your ad revenue. I mean, that was my thought process.
After reading Lorelle’s rant on multipage posts, it came to my attention that these multipage really annoyed a lot of people. But let’s be honest, when an entire industry (such as the magazine industry) is in trouble, sometimes we resort to things that are a little bit annoying – as long as they are tolerable. Anyhow, I decided to perform a grand experiment and split just over half of one of my WordPress site’s 300+ articles into multiple pages. Right away, I saw an increase in my average pageviews. But to my dismay, I lost half of my readers, and as a result half of that site’s monthly advertising revenue.
I couldn’t figure out why that would have happened, so I waited a couple months to see if it I had done something positive, and the search engines were just taking their sweet old time adjusting to the page. 4 Months later, nothing has changed. Traffic is erratic and really always really low compared to where it was months ago. I couldn’t figure out what was responsible for the drop. So now I have it down to two theories. One I discovered that there seems to be a link between the amount of code on one’s site as compared with the amount of text. Pre-multipage posts, I was running a 25%-30% text to code ratio – which is apparently pretty high. When I went to multipage posts, my ratio dropped to as low as 18 and 15%. This is intolerably low. (Check your site’s text to code ratio here) Another factor that may have affected my traffic was my per page load time. For some reason, when a page had multiple pages, it would take about 1 full second more to load than a page that had no extra pages (despite the fact that some pages are incredibly long). My guess is that my traffic dropped because the rankings of my site in the search engines dropped. So the question is what caused the drop in my rankings? It may be the loading time, it may be the text to code ratio, and it might even be a combination of the two. The truth is, I may never know. All I know is that, at least in WordPress’ case, multipage posts may actually harm you in the long run.
