We talk a lot about how a website should be utilized as a single piece of the marketing toolbox online. That’s because your website is a tool, that’s all. For nearly all businesses, their website is how people find out about them these days.
No longer are the majority of people flipping through the phone book or thumbing through the newspaper. Those days are long gone and will likely not return, barring a scenario where electricity is suddenly gone from the world. Website performance is one key to success.
Even your grandma uses the internet to find things, information, and places these days. So why then would you not be doing everything you can to help them do so, as fast as possible?
This is why website performance matters. When your customers and potential customers can access the information they are looking for, about your business, quickly they are more likely to take action sooner. That means you are closing sales faster, your customers are happier, and more than likely you’re forming great relationships so you can succeed even more.
Performance = Effective Searching
How well your website performs can and does have a direct impact on where you show up in relevant search results on all the major search engines. Why, because it’s the search engines job to give people the best answers they can to their questions.
Part of the “best answer” equation is website performance; pages load fast, the website is optimized for mobile use, there aren’t any plugins that block content from loading before they do.
A great way to see how you’re currently scoring is by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how you score.
Now, this is only with Google and their algorithms but we can infer similar requirements are had by all the major search engines.
As you can see, even our site could use some work and that’s as it should be. We should always be trying to improve things.
According to Google, on both Desktop and Mobile our site could benefit from compressing and resizing certain images to increase our PageSpeed rankings. Keeping your website up to snuff is an ongoing venture.
It’s never going to be 100% perfect 100% of the time, but it’s important to keep up on it.
In this score, Google also checks how user-friendly the website is on Mobile. This means that buttons and links are given the appropriate sizing for fingers to be able to tap them and interact with them.
This also means that the page and its elements are optimized for the size of the screen the user is viewing them on.
There are 2 ways to do this, either the site is designed to be fluid or responsive, OR what is called adaptive.
Fluid/responsive refers typically to how the container elements are developed, on a percentage based width system. Adaptive means that certain widths are given a different layout.
This check is really important for the ever-advancing mobile technology. More and more people are using their phones to access the internet every day which means your website needs to be ready and usable.
No matter what your PageSpeed score and the recommendations there, any decent web developer will be able to help you out with it.
Users are the most important part of the equation
One of the best things you can do to keep an eye on your website performance is to see how your users & customers actually use your website.
Their use patterns will tell you what needs to be improved and that’s not just with the technical aspects that we’ve covered so far.
You will also begin to see how your sales copy is working, from headlines to body copy and even text that you may have on buttons.
Staying on top of how your website is working for you and your business is never a waste of time and always a giant benefit.
If you need some help keeping your website up to date, we’d love to offer assistance!
Our SEO and website maintenance programs are your ticket to freedom.
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