Back on September 1st the main navigation of WordPress.org was updated and has already resulted in some excellent improvements in site metrics. In general, we’re seeing more pageviews compared to August, and we’ve seen significantly more visitors in sections like WPTV and News.
Given the relative success of these changes, I’d like to revisit a request that came up during the update. The current “Support” page, as titled within the page and the main nav, located at WordPress.org/support/, actually shows documentation and does not provide any method for visitors to interact with humans (save for a small callout for the forums at the bottom). Even the search box offers to “Search documentation”. There have been a few requests from the Documentation team to change this:
- https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins/issues/262
- https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6387
- https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins/pull/257#discussion_r960790663
- https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6517
Over the last few weeks, there has been some conversation about what we call our “resources” for site visitors and users of WordPress. While there appears to be some consensus around wanting a new landing page that highlights all of these resources, I believe that a few of us at WordCamp US were able to reach a more immediate solution.
An entire month has passed since our September nav revision, and we can see that the web traffic to Support remains largely unchanged at about 2.5 million pageviews per week. This is unsurprising given its menu placement prior to the change and the fact that the name remained unchanged.
Given that we now have a baseline for performance, I’d like to ask Meta to move ahead with re-titling the page and updating its nav item to “Documentation”. I can monitor the performance over the coming month for any abnormalities and report back. The hope is of course that this will have a neutral to positive impact, but we can discuss further in the case that it has any negative impact.
I have commented on https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins/issues/262 accordingly.
Thank you to @milana_cap, @jpantani, and the contributors at the Marketing and Documentation tables at WCUS, and to the ticket authors above: @estelaris, @juanmaguitar, and @kenshino.
+make.wordpress.org/docs/
+make.wordpress.org/design/
+make.wordpress.org/marketing/