This is the fifth part in our series on “How To Increase Your Sales… Without Increasing Your Marketing Budget”, a series of articles we’ve put together to help you make the most of your existing marketing budget generate more sales. The other parts of the series can be found below:
Here’s our fifth tip/tactic, we hope you enjoy it.
#5 – Improve Your Website Performance
While not specifically a “marketing tactic”, one of the key things you can optimise with regards to your website is its speed, and this is especially important when it comes to people looking to purchase on mobile devices.
(Reference: OuterBox Design)
While mobile internet speeds are increasing, they are yet to compete with those available in home via fibre broadband, and while many people browse with their mobile via wifi access points it still pays to ensure your site is optimised for these devices (especially how people interact with it).
And even on desktops or laptops with high speed internet access and more processing power, the speed of your website can have a prominent affect on shopping behaviours, as seen below:
So, you can see that it’s important for your conversion chances to ensure that your website is meeting your customer’s expectations. Not only that, but it will also ensure you feature more highly in Google’s search results after they rolled out a page speed update to their algorithm in July 2018.
Some tips for speeding up your website:
- Optimise your images by shrinking the file size using tools like Jpeg.io and ensure you are using images that are the appropriate size visually i.e. don’t use a 2000px wide image and scale it down to 500px.
- Serve up images based on the user’s device so that they are not loading large images on mobile phones when a much smaller one can do the job just as well, saving not only time but users bandwidth.
- Make sure you are only using Javascript or CSS that your site needs, otherwise you are just wasting the browsers time. This is especially relevant for WordPress users where scripts can be loaded on pages where they are not needed.
- Consider using a content delivery network to deliver your sites assets from a local server. It works by loading a copy of your images and other assets onto servers around the world, meaning your content can be physically closer to your end user.
- Using caching software to stop the browser downloading a new version of your page every time it’s visited. This can be implemented via a plugin for WordPress or on the server, depending on your hosting provider.
- Optimise your fonts by using system fonts (so a user doesn’t need to download them, they will use fonts that exist on their device) and/or ensuring you use a popular Google font (as it’ll be likely the user will have been on another site that uses it before).
These are just some of the tricks you can use to optimise the speed of your website. If you are using WordPress, then there are whole articles out there devoted to speeding it up and it’s possible to make significant gains by making a few changes to how your site is configured and hosted.