A lot of small business owners and marketing managers get caught up in the design of their website when it comes to their online presence. They want it to look eye-catching, they need it to be branded, and they hope to wow customers with their creativity. But while a lot of these things may be nice to have, if your website takes longer to crank into life than a dial-up Internet connection from 1998, then sexy design or not, you may just as well close down your shop.
Why? Because customers are impatient. They want everything now. With so many added pressures, from meeting deadlines to organizing play dates; people simply don’t have the time to wait for your mind-blowing but oh-so-heavy presentation videos to load. This may come as a shock to you, but research shows that as many as 40% of online browsers will give up on a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. And what do they do? They click away to your competition.
If you’ve dipped your toe into the murky waters of SEO, you’ll know that Google has many ranking factors. What is SEO? According to www.brightedge.com, it’s all about making your content visible and valuable to your user. There are more than 200 factors and site speed is definitely one of them.
There are many ways that you can work to speed up your website, from minifying your HTML, JavaScript and CSS, to using a CDN. But the best way to ensure that your site reaches and sustains the lightning speed of a Japanese bullet train is by consulting with an expert like BrightEdge, who can help you achieve the right balance of quality and speed and set up an awesome SEO blog to drive more traffic to your site.
And while the marketing gurus are going crazy for content marketing these days, you need to be selective. Make sure that your copy is well-written, engaging and relevant. That your content encourages likes and shares. Be careful of videos and limit the amount that you have on your site. An inspirational corporate video can be an incredibly effective marketing tool, but videos are the like the Sumo wrestlers of the content marketing world; fat and heavy and they slow down your site.
Also, make sure that your images are optimized, as they account for the majority of downloaded bytes on any page. Optimizing your images will cut down on the number of bytes on each page; and the less bytes your customers’ browsers have to download, the faster the page will be. You can try using programs like Image Optimizer and Optimizilla.
Site speed is an important part of your online marketing strategy, so remember that when you’re assessing your budget for your website, functionality and speed need to take priority over design. And make sure that as you revamp your site and add new images, podcasts, or plug-ins, that they don’t affect your site speed.
