We all know what it’s like to encounter a slow website. We wait for the site to load, a blank white screen taunting us, until after only a couple of seconds we grow annoyed or even worried, wondering if there’s something wrong with the site, and we bolt, perhaps never to return. In the modern internet, waiting seconds for a site to load is excruciating.
So, what if that’s your site? What if your customers are the ones getting antsy and fleeing?
Speed is among the most important components of the user experience on your website. Too often, however, businesses have a blind spot to this detail, missing that their site frustrates their customers and leads them to leave without making a purchase or otherwise doing what they arrived to do.
At Fryed Egg, we work with our clients to ensure that this scenario never occurs, building and maintaining sites that move fast and provide site users with the kind of smooth experience that leaves them happy and ready to return.
Cleaning up code and other factors
If your site isn’t loading nearly instantly, then you’re going to lose people. If it takes users seconds to navigate within your site with each new click -- moving from one page to another or waiting for an entry to be processed -- then it also will affect their view of you and harm your brand. Fortunately, Fryed Egg can keep your site moving quickly with updates that are completed quickly and without affecting the operation of your site. Some of the steps that Fryed Egg takes in the process is creating caching for your site; reducing the size of your website’s images; cleaning up the coding for your site by removing whitespaces, repetition and line breaks; and enabling a content delivery network (CDN), a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and data centers, when it’s appropriate. For site owners, the process is painless. There is no downtime for your site, and it’s critically important.
An ongoing process
A key to maintaining a swift website is treating site speed as an ongoing process. Once you build a beautiful, fast-moving website, you can’t rest and assume it will stay that way. Your site gradually will grow slower and slower if you don’t perform regular maintenance on it. It’s a never-ending game to keep on top of it. Plugins are updated, content changes are made, and you need to fine-tune your site speed along the way. Free websites are available where you can check your site speed. For instance, https://gtmetrix.com/ will provide you with a grade for the speed of your site. If you don’t get an A or B, then it’s time for an update.
Smart organization
In addition to the actual speed of the site itself, you want your site to be well-organized in a way that users can easily navigate the site and find what they’re on the site to do. That means a helpful site index, a straightforwardly arranged menu and the use of clear language so that users can quickly identify where to go on a site and move seamlessly throughout it. A fast site can be undermined with poor organization, but when a fast site is combined with a well-organized one it will create a powerful experience for your users.
Search engine placement
Site speed is a crucial factor for search engine placement purposes. Google highly values site speed and the user experience. If your site is slow, it will hurt your search engine rankings and keep a significant number of people away from visiting your site at all. A fast site, on the other hand, will boost your traffic and therefore boost your business. That makes positive search engine results another important byproduct of placing a premium on focusing on the user experience.
Fryed Egg puts a priority on helping our clients create great user experiences, and we can help you with yours. If you want to see if Fryed Egg is the right agency for your needs, contact us at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected] or visit www.FryedEgg.com.