How Site Speed Impacts Your Bottom Line and 3 Ways To Optimize It

How long do you think you’re willing to wait for a website to load? It’s much shorter than you think.

More than half of consumers will not wait more than three seconds for content to load, according to Google data from 2018.

Despite statistics showing the importance of site speed, the average webpage on a mobile device takes 15.3 seconds to load. Imagine if your Google search took 15 seconds instead of 1 second or less…it would feel like a lifetime, wouldn’t it?

So, why is site speed crucial?

1: Customer Conversion

If a consumer has a negative experience visiting a site on a mobile device, they are 62% less likely to buy from that company in the future. Just think about what that can do to a business, imagine how much of a market audience it can lose.

Site speed investment ensures that you have the largest number of visitors converted to paying customers and that they remain loyal to you and your product.

2: User Experience

Site speed should be your number one priority for creating a positive lasting impression that converts customers and creates brand promoters. Your website is the first impression that you make with a consumer. As a result, it’s important that this impression isn’t negatively impacted by slow site speed.

To create a pipeline of happy customers, you want to give them what they want, and you want to give it to them fast. Whether that’s information, a game, or a membership portal, the user should have the ability to access whatever it is they desire on as many devices as possible, and in most locations, quickly.

Once consumers are confused by slow site speed or poor user interface, you lose them, so keep your site fast, and your interface up to date.

3: Google Rank

Google announced in 2010 that they incorporate site speed into SEO rankings. While it is still isn’t as important as Authority or Relevance, keeping your website fast still plays a role in getting your website to the top of the search results.

“Google will reduce the amount of crawlers it sends to your site if your server is slower than two seconds,” according to a public statement from Google.

This means that Google is less likely to find your website’s latest updates or blog posts which can have a negative impact on your site’s overall search ranking.

How do you improve site speed?

Resovere takes site speed seriously (we produce some of the fastest sites in Tampa). Every site that we create prioritizes a blazing fast page speed for both desktop and mobile-optimized websites. Below are some of the easiest and most impactful methods we use to decrease load time.

1: Minify Files

Your site contains a number of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files that make your website what it is. These files are crucial, but they add to the number of requests that your site makes to a server whenever a user loads one of your pages.

As a result, it’s integral that you remove all of the unnecessary, extra whitespace from these files to ensure your files are as small as possible.

Remove unnecessary code, formatting, and white space throughout your files. We recommend using a dedicated build and deployment process for your code using a tool like Webpack to automatically get rid of all white space when you’re ready to go live.

2: Optimize Images

Images tend to play a major role when it comes to site speed. People tend to upload massive files to their website, and in return, it makes their site load very, incredibly slow.

Easy ways to ensure your images are optimized and loading quickly are to resize and /crop images to the exact size they show on your website. Run your images through online generators (we recommend Kraken.io) or software (Sketch and Photoshop) to save quality while minimizing the amount of space that image actually occupies.

Also, understand specific file types and when it is best to use them throughout your site: JPEG, SVG, PNG.

  1. JPEG

    This is the best file format for images. They use irreversible compression (a.k.a. lossy compression), some data is lost when you save in this format. It’s best to use anywhere on your site that you’d need a crisp photo (i.e banner photos, logos, graphics) as well as pages that have several photos.

  2. SVG

    They are an XML based vector format that can be compressed, searched, indexed, and scripted. They are best used for any animated or interactive graphics.

  3. PNG

    They use lossless compression. This type of compression ensures you don’t lose any data, but it means that it will be larger than a jpg. They are best used anywhere that you need the photo or graphic to have a transparent background.

3: Combine and Defer JavaScript

Deferring JavaScript means prohibiting the JavaScript files to load until every other item on the page has loaded.

JavaScript files are huge, by deferring them you allow the other portions of your content to load without any delay.

Site speed matters and can cause an impact. That impact can be positive or negative depending on how you invest in your digital presence.

5 Marketing Mistakes Startups Make

It’s estimated that about 325,000 startups are formed each year within the United States, according to business formation reports by the United States Census Bureau. With their founders working to make an impact, marketing is a key tool for any business to reach the pinnacle of great performance.

Marketing done right should be a priority for most startups, yet, many don’t look into creating a strategy, costing them their bottom line. Below is a list of common marketing mistakes startups make so you can identify what you should avoid in order better your chances of overall success.

1: Posting Too Much Low-Quality Content

It’s important for beginner marketers to know: Publishing a lot of content doesn’t mean that you’ll rank higher when it comes to SEO. It’s actually quite a common misconception. What does matter are two things: Authority and Relevance.

Authority is a statistic that indicates the strength of your domain’s ranking relative to other related domains. Relevance, on the other hand, is how well your content matches certain search queries.

It’s important to know that authority is mainly built through high-quality backlinks (high-quality sites linking your article on one of their pages), NOT content volume. You can have all of the content in the world on one page, but if that content isn’t helpful or worth referencing, other sites won’t link it and the page won’t have nearly as much impact on your SEO.

When it comes to attracting new site visitors, create smart content with purpose, it’ll always prevail over low-quality writing that’s produced in bulk.

2: Not Measuring or Analyzing Data

Forgetting to measure data from the day you start can be one of the biggest mistakes a startup can make when it comes to marketing. Not recording data prevents you from having benchmark data. “Benchmarking” is when a business compares their performance metrics to those in their industry to see what works and what doesn’t. This allows a company to make adjustments in strategy, content creation, and ensure they’re on the right track.

Forgetting to measure data, whether it’s paid promotion or not, prevents you from determining whether or not you’ve had a successful return on investment.

By forgetting to measure these metrics, you are losing valuable data on who your audience is, what type of posts they engage with, conversion and overall growth.

3: Not Utilizing Free Resources Instead Of Paid Promotion

Luckily, we live in a time where there are countless channels to use to engage your target audience. Discovering which ones have a positive impact and which ones have a negative impact depends on who your audience is.

Most companies have several target audiences, so there is no need to rush to find out who your audience is. But recognize that each audience may have a very specific channel.

Startups have a tendency to go directly into paid promotion rather than searching for free resources. Thinking that there will be value in paid promotion without engaging with their audience.

Throughout your community, there are many sources to help you with your marketing efforts and to just spread the word about what you’re doing.

Finding local blogs, influencers, organizations who align with your mission or values is a great way to build an audience.

Content is king, but distribution is queen.

4: Trying To Perfect Their Brand Too Early

It doesn’t matter how long you and your team sit in a think tank and work on your branding, it will never be perfect when you start.

Refusing to publish content before you’ve finalized what your brand will look like hinders you from building an engaged audience. Your brand evolves as you continue to figure out more about the company and the more the faces behind the company have an impact.

Startups get their team together, sit down and rewrite their verbiage, redesign their websites, even change their brand colors, and logo over and over again. This can be one of the largest wastes of financial and human resources.

Your brand lives and breathes alongside the people who come in and make an impact on your company. Allow your brand to evolve and adapt.

5: Giving Everyone A Voice When Choosing The Brand Identity

Although the intention of getting your whole team involved in creating your brand is wonderful, it is not the most practical. Everyone—me, you, your co-worker (probably even your dog), has some sort of stance when it comes to branding. Whether it be that you preferred the orange simplicity of NASA’s notorious Worm logo, or the blue boldness of the current blob known as the Meatball, people are going to have opinions, and even though this can be beneficial at times, it makes finalizing anything far more difficult.

When it comes to choosing a brand identify, keep the number of decision makers down to a minimum. Obviously you’ll want employee and customer feedback throughout the process in order to achieve buy-in, but when it comes to making those final branding decisions, we recommend keeping things to a group of your most experienced marketers.

Marketing is a strategic tool that can create impact, audience, and conversion if done well. You can have a revolutionary product, but what good is it, if no one knows about it?