Improve website speed to get more customers

One of the fundamental mistakes that most SME make in their digital marketing is not paying enough attention to improve website speed to get more customers. A slow loading website directly impacts the number of visitors that you will ultimately be left with on your website. That’s largely because most SMEs while developing their website tend to look at them on their desktops and if they find it attractive enough will approve it. Website developers on the same hand pay little attention to improve website speed to get more customers.

Today’s most users tend to access websites from their mobile devices & usually the connections are either on a 4G or 3G or in some cases even on a 2G connection.  When you have low website site speed your business could be a victim of:

1. Visitors not waiting to view the full site and leaving within seconds.
2. Visitors who want to do business with you find frustrating waiting for the pages to load

In both cases, you’re going to be losing customers to your competition. The good news is that one can easily improve website speed to get more customers

Test your existing website speed

There are several tools available to improve website speed to get more customers

My favorite is of course Google Speed Test. Simply type in your website URL

Google will then throw back a result for both mobile devices and desktop, which look like this:

As you can see Google color codes the speed from Red to Green and shows you what specific elements are impacting your website speed.  The minimum ideal speed for your website when you do your test on Google should be at least 70/100 on Mobile and at least 90/100 on desktop. Anything lower indicates that you need to improve website speed to get more customers. The usual suspects that cause your website speed to slow down are:

1. Images have not been optimized for the web
2. Server speed. i.e. the speed at which the server where your website is hosted responds to requests. If you find this is making your site slow, it’s time to shift your hosting service provider to someone like Cloudrino or GoDaddy
3. The way your developer has written his codes on your website. Usually programmers choose the fastest and easiest way to code and often this result in impacting the website speed.

Improve website speed by following instructions

While doing online marketing, most of the tools like Google tells you what problems are with your website speed and shows you exactly what is to be fixed.  For instance the picture below shows that several images from the earlier case example have an opportunity to be optimized that would give an 83% reduction in their sizes.

If you are really concerned about improving website speed to get more customers, then one should definitely check his website site before taking handover from your website developer of a digital marketing agency or freelancer. One good practice is to share with them before you commence the work the benchmarks that you would use to measure your website. This will ensure that the developer or freelancer pays attention on specific aspects that can impact your website speed.

Another great tool to use to check your website speed (I would strongly recommend this if you like technology or have some basic understanding of HTTP requests) is GT Metrix. This is the tool preferred by good website developers to improve website speed to get more customers for the client.

Here is what the same website speed test report looks like in GT Metrix

As you can see again, the Page Speed Score is quite slow. GT Metrix gives you a relative score rather than an absolute one and also allows you to compare your speed relative to your competition. It indicates you taking relevant steps to improve website speed to get more customers. After all, if you’re competitors’ website speed is worse than yours; you’re probably going to get his traffic coming to you!!

Here’s what two local competitors look like when compared with each other:

As you can clearly see across key parameters Gols Coaching scores above Toppers Institute  despite having a higher number of server requests.

Now imagine you’re a student for CA Coaching who discovered these two potential institutes to study from and is accessing their website on his or her mobile phone. Who do you think is likely to get the customer? Who is likely to lose the customer because of slow website speed? You know that! So start working on improving website speed to get more customers.