Tag: website loading speed

How to Build your Very First Website as a Solopreneur

Scott Asai1 Comment

Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

In this day and age, you have to make sure that you have an online presence as a business. Studies have shown time and time again that 97% of consumers search for local companies first and 94% of B2B buyers look online too. Creating your own site is not difficult when you look at the amount of tools that are out there, and you would be surprised at how much it could help you to make the most out of your site in general. If you want to find out more about that, then simply take a look below.

Make it Responsive

62% of shoppers made purchases by using their smartphone in the year 2016. The number has increased dramatically since then, not to mention that people are choosing to order online over going into a store.  At the end of the day, if you want to make sure that your visitors are making the most out of your site, then you have to make sure that it is responsive. 40% of customers will choose to shop with a competitor if they do not have a good experience when browsing a website with a phone. If you want your site to be successful, then catering to your mobile users should always be your first priority. If it isn’t then you may find that things end up not going your way and that you see a huge drop in your conversion rate.

Make your Site Easy to Find

You need to make sure that the domain name you have describes both your company name and your business name well. If you have multiple domains, then make sure that they all point to your site. You also need to make sure that your domain is easy to remember. If it isn’t then you may find that you end up struggling and that you also find it very difficult to get ahead in the SERPs. If you need some help, look into core web vitals.

Your Contact Information

If you know for a fact that your business depends on people contacting you or even calling your sales team then you have to make sure that you put this information above the fold. You have to make sure that people can find you easily and you also need to make sure that you are taking the right steps to boost your conversions. Your contact information should ideally be at the top of your home page so that visitors don’t have to spend too long looking for a phone number or even an address if they want to contact your business.

Make it Easy to Navigate

It’s so important that you make your site easy to navigate. If your site is not easy to navigate then you may find that you end up struggling to convert and that you have a very high bounce rate. Ideally you need to have five tabs which are all clearly labelled. You also need to have related pages underneath each one. Your users should have a way to get back to the home page regardless of where on your site they land. Very often, a search page can take your user to one of your service pages as opposed to your home page, so you need to keep this in mind.

Uncluttered Pages

Your readers need to be able to put things into context. If you are overloading someone’s mind with information, then this will make it much harder for them to retain the right information and you may also find that it’s harder for you to make your sale. You need to use a nice mixture of text and graphics if possible as this will help you to give them a very clear page and it will also help you to rocket your success overall.

One way for you to make your pages simple would be for you to cut down on the amount of social widgets you have. This can include Twitter feeds. If you aren’t sure if you should do this or not, then ask yourself, are you really adding information that your users care about? If your feed does not support the page, then remove it. It’s not needed.

Make sure Everything is Accurate

It goes without saying that information that is not accurate will turn consumers away from your company. It doesn’t matter if you have a wrong number, some outdated information or even a few grammar errors because this will make your company look unprofessional. You should make sure that you proofread each page you have before it goes live, and you should also check each page periodically too. This is especially the case if you are updating your site in other ways.

Speed

Studies have shown time and time again that over 88% of people have a negative association with sites that are buggy or slow. 28% of people say that they would go to a competitor if they felt as though the site they were trying to access was taking too long to load. It’s so important that you keep your site running smoothly by updating your software and also by trying to find a website that can actually handle the bandwidth demands that you have.

The Importance of a CTA

Each and every page on your website should ultimately entice the reader to take some kind of action. They need to sign up for a service, call you or even download the white paper you are offering. You have to make sure that there is a clear piece of information telling them what to do and you also need to keep it above the fold if possible. This will help your readers to really make the most out of their experience and it helps you in terms of conversions.

Simple Designs are Key

Limit the use of different colors, fonts or gifs. This can distract you and it can also pull eyes away from the ultimate focus of a website page. If you can add bullet points, even better as it will boost your conversion rate more.

Easy Ways To Improve SEO

Scott Asai1 Comment

Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

It is not enough to have a working website for your business. Remember, the purpose of you creating a website is to improve conversion and hopefully invite new business. It should be easy for people to find you when they are generally searching for your products or services. The only way to ensure that you are being found in a Google search is to improve your SEO.

Your SEO, or search engine optimization, is imperative to showing up on the first or second pages of a Google search. Studies have shown that the top results that show up on a Google search page have a 33 percent chance of getting clicked. Most people do not even venture onto the second page of the search results page. You want to make sure Google ranks you in the top search results. Here are some easy ways you can improve your SEO from some of the best SEO companies.

Loading Speed

The loading speed of your page has to improve if you want your SEO to improve as well. Slow loading speed will signal to Google that your webpage is not user friendly. You may rank low because of this. If it takes more than three seconds for your webpage to load, it is loading too slowly. Because of this, people will abandon your site and likely never come back, hurting your site’s popularity and decreasing your chances of ranking in the top search results. Google’s algorithm takes all of this into account when ranking. Check your site’s plugins and themes as they could be the culprit.

Create High-Quality Content

Content is king, especially if you want to improve your SEO. Great content will organically bring in traffic to your website. Not only will your content have to be of great quality but it also needs to be timely and relevant. If you have that kind of information on your website, people will spend more time on there, which can help increase your SEO. When you provide useful content to your customers, you are providing them with information. That alone will keep them wanting to come back for more if nothing else.

SEO Your Photos

The pictures on your website also need to be optimized for SEO. This means they have to be the correct format and file size. If your pictures are too big, that could cause your website to load too slowly, further hurting your SEO ranking. Make sure that you resize or compress your images so they are not so big. Another way to improve your SEO ranking using your photos is to tag your photos with keywords. You can do this by adding the keywords in the title of your images or in the caption and descriptions.

Use Header Tags

Headings helps to break up your written content, making it easier to read for your website visitors. If all people see is big blocks of text, they will not want to read whatever it is even if the content is high-quality. Headings make things more appealing which ultimately improve your SEO ranking.

Converting Your Website’s Visitors Into Customers

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Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

Getting visitors to your website, but no customers? In order for a website to generate customers, it needs to have the right design features to get people buying. Here are a few key tips for helping to build more leads from your website.  

Make sure you’re attracting the right visitors

If you’re getting lots of visitors but few customers, you may want to check how visitors are arriving at your site. It’s possible that inappropriate keywords may be optimized, leading to the wrong type of visitors arriving at your site. Investing in the help of an SEO service provider could help you to optimize relevant keywords that attract the right visitors and get them buying. You can use analytics tools to see which keywords visitors are using.

Speed up slow-loading pages

If your website’s pages take too long to load, visitors may get impatient and leave. This could be stopping you from getting customers. Slow-loading pages can be the result of many issues ranging from a slow hosting provider to possibly too many plug-ins/embedded media. There are guides online that can help you to improve the speed of your site’s pages.

Ensure your website looks professional

Your website needs to look professional in order to gain visitors’ trust. If it looks amateurish, visitors will assume that your company is run by amateurs. It could be worth hiring a website reviewer to check your site and point out any improvements they think need to be made. This will determine whether your site needs redesigning (you may want to hire a professional web designer to do this).

Show off your credibility

In order to trust a business site, consumers like to be able to see evidence of credibility. Award and qualification badges, testimonials and case studies can all show people that you’re qualified and experienced. Make sure to also check reviews of your company on the likes of Google and TrustPilot to ensure that it’s largely positive – too many third-party negative reviews could be damaging your ability to generate leads.

Keep the checkout process simple

A complicated checkout process can put off visitors. Lengthy sign-up procedures made up of multiple pages can irritate potential customers. Try to keep the checkout process to as few pages as possible and consider making signing-up optional. You should also make sure that you’re using a professional checkout process builder tool to help minimize bugs and glitches. Some company sites may not have a checkout process and may rely on customers ringing up to book a quote – if this is the case, make sure your contact details aren’t hard to find.

Expand your payment options

The final hurdle for customers is likely to be your site’s payment gateway. Aside from accepting debit card, consider whether you should also accept credit card and possibly alternative forms of payment such as cryptocurrency. Certain customers may be put off if you don’t offer their preferred payment option (credit card could be particularly important when it comes to large value items).

Make Them Wait, See Them Disappear

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For every business, time is money, but that can be true for customers too. Customers that are in a rush, or browsing while on the move don’t have time to wait for your website or other features to load. They might only have a short amount of time and thus they need to make sure every second is not wasted. You would think that with the advent of smartphones and Google prioritizing mobile friendly websites that this would be a no brainer. Yet, so many small businesses don’t realize how long waiting times make people just swipe or click away. And yet, the standard of what can be deemed ‘too long’ is also changing. Maybe 5 years ago it could take 5 seconds to load up a page and seen as normal. Now, 5 seconds is just too long. Inherently, you should be up to speed with what kind of technology you’re using as well.

Focus on priority content

Take for example your business blog, you don’t want certain pieces of content to load slower than others. Sometimes you have catchy slogans, titles and first paragraphs or sentences that are designed to capture the reader so they don’t click away so easily. Well, you need to give your main content priority when it comes to the loading que. If you have videos and text together, you need to choose which one is going to be more eye catching and thus order them correctly. Maybe you think your blog content is more important than any visuals, thus images and videos will need to load after the text. This also comes down to any ads you’re running on the webpage. If you have a video or PPC ad in the banner, you need to decide whether to load the ads first or the content. In other words, you need to formulate a queue so you have a better chance of keeping the consumer on the page for the initial few seconds.

Speed is essential

Speed is often the savior in many forms of life. The speed of your transactions, decision making, problem solving and also webpage loadings is vital to success. Take a look at Pagespeedplus.com where you can learn how the speed of your web pages can be calculated and improved. Sometimes the homepage loads faster because it’s going to be the main page in the results of search engines. However you may also need to keep a high standard for your ‘browse products’ page. Although it’s understandable that this kind of page will be slower because of the amount of links and images. However, this page will always be added to thus the page will load slower and slower. Using bulk testing you can see which pages aren’t loading as fast as you’d like them to.

 

Allow quick access

For businesses that allow users to create accounts and profiles, you will have a sign in or log in bar on the homepage or pretty much every webpage. However users that just want to log in to comment on a post in the forums, comment on a blog post or just generally sign in so they can use their account to shop, should not be left waiting for the log/sign in bar to load. Therefore this is also something you must take into account when designing the bar itself. Your page might load from the top down, or just individually but the login bar must be one of the first in the line. You might also want to allow the bar to be inside of another item such as a profile picture. This adds another step to the process even though the profile picture may be the first thing that loads up. However if you put the login bar as a separate item to load, this can mean you need to sacrifice content in the loading que. It’s good practice to therefore make the login bar top priority for only some pages because after all, it may only be used by those that are regular customers. 

Speed is absolutely essential when it comes to loading times. Pages that are not set up for mobiles will not keep that browsing commuting consumer on your website for long. It’s even easier to swipe away than it is to go back on a desktop computer. It’s also within your best interest to make sure you have a content priority queue. Only the most important content that you believe will keep customers on the page for longer should be loading up first.