Does your website work?
Do you get regular traffic?
Are you getting regular leads from your website?
When, at a networking event, I asked those three questions to a businessman and website owner, this was his response:
“I don’t have an ecommerce website, so that doesn’t apply to me. I have a website because everyone expects me to have one. It’s not as if businesses like mine sell through their website – that’s impossible.”
Unfortunately, thinking like that, he’s never likely to sell through his website. And if he isn’t getting any leads from it that would suggest his website is poorly built and poorly written.
An easy-to-use structure and well-written site will boost your conversion rate (assuming your SEO strategy is targeting the correct keywords). But there is another factor that is often ignored – the speed at which your website loads.
A slow loading website could lose you 7% of your potential conversions
According to a recent post on Bryan Eisenberg’s blog, a 1 second delay in your download speed could result in:
- 7% fewer conversions
- 11% fewer page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
There are several factors that can affect your load speed, for example image size, social media buttons or the size of your website.
The optimum download time is under two seconds (this will help improve your rankings significantly). So how do you get your site to load faster?
- Check your speed
If you don’t monitor your speed, you won’t know how well you are performing. Use tools such as Google Analytics to help you with this. Bryan also suggests a couple of his favourite tools: The Web Page Speed Report, Yahoo’s YSlow plugin, Google’s Page Speed plug-in, Loads In and WebPagetest.
There are others available but this will get you started.
Remember for every button and image you add to your website, you’ll be increasing the time it takes for your website to load.
- Coding
This one is for your web designer to look at for you. The coding of your site (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) can also have an effect on download speeds, so it’s best to chat to your designer about what can be done to tweak it.
- Images
Images and graphics look great on websites. They can be used to illustrate your products or they can make your text more impactful. But the more you use, the higher your load time.
Condensing your images, using the right format for the right task and reducing the overall number will help.
Why you need to know this
If you have a website, you would have invested heavily in it. Therefore, why would you not expect to see a return on that investment?
A website isn’t an online brochure. It is a powerful sales tool. Available 24/7, it offers potential customers a means to get to understand your company and what you can do for them.
Every businesses website should sell. It should bring in leads – in essence, it should be your 24 hour sales team.
If you’re not getting leads from your site ask yourself why not? Review the structure, content, load time, keywords and analytics.
A business with a website that isn’t performing is like a High Street store that keeps its door locked all the time.
Review your website today and make sure it’s working for you.
2 comments ↓
Website traffic is hard to get without using article marketing. Article marketing is the best traffic source available and has true realistic results.
Your information about optimizing with seo techniques to help increase website conversions is insightful. I am always looking at other ways to optimize like landing page seo. There are so many different ways to optimize a website. Article marketing is still one of the best ways via backlinks too.
Leave a Comment