Loading Time Matters

The speed at which your website loads is crucial to making sales and retaining visitors. Did you know that after 5 seconds, if a website still hasn’t fully loaded, you will lose 4.4% of visitors for each additional second? So, if it takes 10 seconds to load your site, then you just lost 22% of the originally interested prospects. This is a big deal, and a critical area to focus on because after you put in all the work to create a valuable product or service, hire employees, and pay for email marketing, you could still lose not generate enough leads all due to a seemingly less important issue.

Here are some tips to speed up the process, so you don’t lose any would be sales after someone clicks the link in your marketing email and loses interest because the website wasn’t loading fast enough:

Keep Short & Simple

There should always be an emphasis on maintaining minimal content on the landing page with calls to action (“buy now”, “sign me up” buttons), but few realize that it also affects the loading speed. So having too much content on the landing page is a terrible idea, spread the information around onto other pages. For example, make an FAQ page, don’t fill up the bottom of the landing page with descriptions making the page load take longer and forcing the customer to scroll down to read the product description and watch videos.

Also, be wary of high-resolution imagery. File size and formats can affect speed. A high-resolution background or image might be +10MB in size, this is going to take a few seconds to load, especially for those that may not be using a fast internet connection. So, don’t waste more of your customer's time, try and use images that are under 1MB. Save the images as PNG and try compressing them with tools. You want to use PNG formats rather than JPEG because the file won’t lose data after it’s compressed.

Perhaps your product is designed to save them time, so start by showing it. The landing page doesn’t need to have a cool looking large video reel, you can put that on the “products” or “features” page.

Get The Coding Right

Coding the cache is appreciated since the next time someone visits the site, the loading speed won’t be nearly as slow as the first time. Also ensure you tweak technical aspects like bulky code, inline CSS, or comments that can cause the pages to be pending longer when clicked.

Place Your Videos Elsewhere

For videos, why even bother putting them on your website? Post them on a 3rd party site like YouTube and just place the link on your website. Now, videos playing on your website look better, cooler, and professional, but again, you’ve got to get the coding right to reduce the loading time to a minimum. Converting visitors into sales is more important how the website looks, so don’t feel bad if, after testing, it’s better to just post the video link on the product page (which routes the user to view on YouTube). 

Use A Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network cache’s your website on multiple data centres and proxy servers across the globe. This will allow prospects halfway across the world to load your landing page from a closer data centre. For example, if your website is hosted in the USA and you have a customer in South Africa, it’s going to take a lot longer to load the site from the US data centre rather than from a proxy server locally in South Africa. So, spend the extra bucks and plan to have your site load ready from anywhere, this is essential if your customers are remote workers and can be living anywhere in the world. 

For services, just Google “content delivery network” and you’ll see options like Amazon CloudFront.

AMP Websites

One could consider using an AMP website, they are super-fast thanks again to the type of coding employed. This is a lazy approach, to just pay a service versus figuring out the coding yourself, but it can be a final resolution.

How Does This Tie Into sendbat?

As you continue the journey of building a successful website, the number of visitors is crucial to sales and collecting customer data. Using sendbat’s email marketing campaigns will encourage all contacts to click a link and visit your website to purchase products. The percentage of individuals opening your emails, to begin with, is very low (15%), and even fewer will convert into paying customers. There is no excuse for losing the interest of prospects just because your website is loading too slow. Fix your loading speed today and start successfully marketing to your contacts with sendbat to generate the sales you’ve always dreamed of. There’s money being left on the table by not attracting would-be customers from your contact list. Purchase sendbat today or “sign me up” for a trial.

Start sending out emails/SMS campaigns today with sendbat. Current users are enjoying an average click-through rate of 15%. Such open rates are something your sales team cannot afford to miss. Sign up for sendbat at mydev.com

For any questions feel free to contact: sendbat@mydev.com or call (224)279–1076.