Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to study how web site quality affects traffic performance. Design/methodology/approach - An experimental design is employed to study how web quality affects traffic performance. A revamping of the experimental web site was used as the treatment, targeting visitors' perceived quality of the web site. Four traffic performance measures, page: views, visitor count, daily registrations, and average duration are tracked, and t-tests are performed on pre-treatment and post-treatment data. Findings - The analysis shows very positive responses among members; visitor count, page views and average duration increased for opt-in and opt-out members. For visitor count, even non-members showed increases. However, daily registration, which measures how many non-members become members each day, did not change. Non-members visited more, but neither viewed more pages, nor stayed longer. Average duration is identified as the key factor for discerning visitor groups. Research limitations/implications - The experimental web site belongs to one web site category. The generalization is subject to reasoning by practitioners. Practical implications - It was found that: to increase membership, alternative schemes must be employed, perhaps along the lines of a non-technical approach; to acquire more members, do not focus on converting known non-members. Those with the same demographic profile as existing members should be targeted; and the question must be asked whether the fact that opt-in members are stickier than opt-out members is a trait or a consequence of opt-in members receiving e-mails periodically, while opt-out members chose not to receive e-mails. Originality/value - With few existing traffic experiments in the literature, this study is unique, as are its implications.
