What happens to a business with a slow website?

Part of the work we do with digital marketing is to look for ways to make improvements across digital platforms.  When it comes to any time of client, the faster you can get them the information the better.  If you website is running slow, chance are you are probably losing your audience before you have a chance to make a good impression. A slow website can cost you clients and customers.

Did you know that according to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less!  Even more staggering, users  tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds.  A slow website is a deal breaker.  The best thing that you can do as part of your marketing strategy is to make sure you are optimizing your content in order to make your site more user friendly.

Is your online store giving your customers the best buying experience?

79% of web shoppers who have trouble with website performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again.  If you are like me, I think you will agree that we want return business from happy customers.  We can’t have happy customers returning if the user experience is arduous.  and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.

How do you check your website speed?

There is good news, there are free tools you can use to check your website speed.  The first one is by Google and it is called “Think With Google”  it allows you to put your website URL and they will test it for you.  Within a minute you will know how well your site is performing.

Is your website mobile friendly?

One of the biggest game changers for digital marketing strategists has been making sure our clients have mobile friendly websites.  We recently did a report for one clients that was astounding.  They got 150% more traffic than they did a year ago without a mobile friendly site.  The difference was astounding.  Just by making their website mobile friendly we were able to attract that many more customers to their online store.  The user experience really does matter.  Make sure you are making it easy for people to use your website on the technology that they prefer.

Today, Google estimates that 90% of searches are done from mobile devices.  Having a mobile friendly website is a must in today’s market.

Are large images bogging down your website?

Large images can be slowing down your website. It is not enough to have a website template that is mobile friendly, you also have to have it load quickly.  Improving a slow website means that you have to  optimize everything to truly help you maximize your results.  Think about it.  You have to have an image big enough to be seen on a desktop screen, but small enough to not slow a mobile phone version down.  There are several ways you can tackle this issue.  Many shopping platforms like Bigcommerce, and Shopify, offer apps you can load into your website for a cost, that will optimize the images on your pages for you.

The other option is to use a tool like TinyPNG  it will optimize files in a PNG or JPG format for you to download. Then you have to do the work to replace the images on your website with the web optimized images.  The Tiny PNG tool uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files. They selectively decreasing the number of colors in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. The effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in file size!  You can often save up to 60-80% off of the original image.  The less space a file takes, the faster it loads.

As an example we took the image for this blog, and ran it through the web optimization tool TinyPNG.  The original file was over 200KB and after we ran it through the image optimization tool we reduced the file size by 78%.  The final image was less than 50KB.  That is a great space savings to make this blog load faster for you!

Ask for help if you don’t have a digital marketing strategist to help you.

Know what you are good at, and what you need to ask for help for.  Your value to your business is to your customers.  Spending time to look at optimizing your slow website may  not be the most productive use of your time.  Today, there are people like us that can really help you develop a plan to improve the usability of your current site, or help you find a web developer to create a beautiful mobile friendly site with great content and optimized for your customers.  If you would like to know where you stand with your current website, and want us to take a look, we would be happy to help you.  That is what we do.  It is what we LOVE helping our customers do.  Contact Us today and let’s talk.