For any online marketing campaign, the ultimate goal isn’t to generate traffic, but to start conversation and convert site visitors into clients. Because of this, everything about your website has to be tailored to meet your needs, appeal to your target audience’s interests and yield the desired results. You may have the content that can get the job done, but that’s only part of what makes a website that leads to new clients.
Your website load speed can have a large impact on whether or not people will investigate further, and it can also have a negative impact on whether or not your website is even shown at all in popular search engines. Many are surprised to learn that coding and website load time have a contributory role in SEO. Search engine optimization isn’t just about flooding your page with keywords; it’s about content, layout, coding and other factors such as your load speed that lead to greater visitor satisfaction and conversion rates.
Site speed optimization is one change you will want to make if your business’ online marketing hasn’t been generating the results you expected; even if you’re getting hundreds of clicks per day, that’s dozens of potential inquiries you’re missing out on. One of those factors could be a poor design and slow load time, which bores visitors and sends them elsewhere. Learn how to test performance of website pages and you’ll be one step closer toward getting the clients you want.
You can turn to a web design company, who specialize in site speed optimization tools and techniques, but before that you can visit a site like webpagetest.org and see how your website speed fares across real browsers, in this case Internet Explorer and Chrome. You paste your site’s URL in the bar, and then choose a test location. You can select from the map, and specify which browser you want to use. Testing the speed of your website from multiple locations is helpful, but this tool is particularly useful to those who have a local business online and want to see how their website is being perceived by the community.
The test results from webpagetest.org will present you with an analytical overview of your website. These findings include the load time from both the first view and repeated view, how many bytes are used, your start render, speed index and DOM elements. The content breakdown infographic located at the bottom of the page will display what content on your website takes the most amount of time for your webpage to render. For most people who are seeking site speed optimization, the answer lies in coding.
An affordable website design from a trusted web design company can transform your website from barely noticed to raking in clients. Clean coding doesn’t just present an appealing page to visitors; it is embedded with metadata descriptions, headers, titles and other useful HTML tags that search engines like Google crawl and read in order to present them to people searching for related terms.
Without good coding, a website that’s chock full of information can be ranked low and have little to no traffic. In today’s tech-based marketing industry, websites serve as a gateway between most businesses and their potential clients. Given that your first impression is made online, it’s important to have a site that demonstrates your company’s efficiency through a fast load time and clean layout, starting things off on the right foot and bringing you the new clients you need to grow.
