Increased Download Rates

We made a change to our websites a couple weeks ago, that really seems to have increased the number of downloads!

Previously, the home page had a "Download" button that linked to a separate download page. Pretty ordinary, I made a copy here so you can see.

I could see from the logs that the number of viewers on the homepage, to the viewers of the download page, to the actual files downloads decreased each step. I thought to try some changes to remove some steps--but still keep the information on the old Download page.

Many sites do a Download button, then on the 2nd page use the Meta-Refresh tag to send the download. That works, but gives the Security Warning in Internet Explorer. And I didn't want that either, it's another step for people to download the file.

I started with GetRight Pro, and changed so the download button sent directly to the installer EXE, but also added some javascript, a timer set by the onclick, to refresh the page to a similar "Your download has started" page with the same information as before.

It was right the day after a new version, which spikes the downloads, but they were higher than before. After a week, we changed GetRight to do the same. And it showed a similar increase on the day of the switch--and it's nothing trivial, it's a 10 to 20% increase! Thanks to the nice graphs that FileKicker can do, it's pretty easy to see--this is a 3 month period of downloads, and easy to see the peaks for the new versions.

Here is the basic HTML...just calling a JavaScript timer function in the onclick

<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
function handleClick() {
setTimeout('window.location.href = "http://pro.getright.com/getting.html"', 3000);
}
//-->
</script>

<A href="http://get-right.com/getright_setup.exe" onclick="handleClick();">Download Now</a>

If you just download GetRight or GetRight Pro, you can see how it works!