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To a marketing company, website performance means more than just load times, image rendering, and bounce rate. It defines a significant part of your company’s authority and relevancy in the eyes of your audience and search engines alike. The unfortunate truth is that potential leads may never get to see what your solutions and services are—because they’ve already left your website due to poor performance.
To ensure your marketing company isn’t missing out on lead generation and search engine optimization (SEO) opportunities, here are a few tips to improve your website performance.
Clean and organized landing pages help you avoid a high bounce rate
When it comes to your website’s performance, even a single second can make a big difference for load times, user engagement, and bounce rate. In fact, 61% of users will move on to a different website if they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly. If a potential lead is viewing one of your landing pages—such as a downloadable content offer—they will need to see immediate value and understand the offer with as little time as possible. It all comes down to the way you convey your offer through the page’s messaging and usage of visuals:
- Provide an image or visually stimulating animation of your offer. For example, a downloadable playbook might use an animation of a book opening and displaying a preview page. A simple animation like this can go a long way; it helps visually convey to the user what they will be receiving in exchange for their personal info via a form.
- Your landing page shouldn’t have a navigation menu and other potential distractions. One of the key components of a strong landing page is that it serves as the final step in a short lead conversion journey—the end goal being a final download/form fill. Navigation bars and outgoing links on your landing page provides opportunities for a potential lead to exit the page altogether—which you certainly don’t want!
- Optimize your landing page for fast loading times. This may sound like a no brainer, but some marketers may not realize that a smaller, more simplified page—compared to the rest of their website—won’t automatically perform well. Earlier we mentioned that adding visuals is beneficial, but it shouldn’t be at the cost of page speed. Every aspect of your landing page should be optimized properly and serve a purpose.
Minimize the number of HTTP requests on your website
On a more technical side of your website’s performance, too many HTTP requests cause weak performance and longer load times. There are many parts of your website—such as images and scripts—that HTTP requests are made for. This is where a simple, clean design for your marketing company’s website can pay off. By cutting down on unnecessary clutter across your website, you can minimize the number of HTTP requests. For example, reducing file sizes and eliminating unneeded redirect links on your website is a good place to start. While redirects are important to help fix broken links, an excessive amount can have a negative impact on your website speed. Compress large file sizes to improve loading times and—for downloadable elements—reduce the amount of time it takes for a download.
Here is a list of a few free image compression tools your marketing company may consider:
- JPEG Optimizer
- Compressor.io
- JPEG Mini
- Optimizillia
Faster load times leaves a positive impact on search engine optimization
Everything is coming full circle now! A website that loads quickly not only encourages users to continue browsing and engage with your site’s content; it also proves to search engines that your website is a credible source. We’ve all heard how important keyword phrases, meta descriptions, and interlinking is for SEO, but page speed is certainly a strong factor as well. When your website has pages that either take several seconds to load or fail to load altogether, it signals to search engines that your website is not properly optimized and could potentially be unsecured as well.
Google, in particular, uses page speed as one of its main algorithm methods to rank websites—which is all the more reason to prioritize quick load times. In addition to image compression and minimizing redirect links, there are other methods to improve webpage speed your marketing company can try:
- Shortening CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Implementing browser caching
- Removing render-blocking JavaScript
- Removing plug-ins that are not essential
Your website’s performance makes a huge difference when it comes to lead generation, SEO, and the overall reputation of your marketing company. For additional strategies to improve your website performance, design, and content, check out more of our blog posts! Thinkdm2 is a New Jersey digital marketing and branding agency with experience in web development for the SaaS, IoT, and professional services industries.
