Regardless of whether you have gained top listings on the search engines or not for your most important keyword phrases and even if you are getting hundreds of surfers on your website on a daily basis, these visitors may not be spending money or otherwise taking an action on your website that will generate income for you.
Clearly, not all visitors are going to translate into sales, but a fair number of them should and if you aren't seeing that then it could be for several different reasons. This 4 part series will detail things that you can and should be doing with your website if you want to turn more visitors into dollars.
Jumping right into it then, one of the main reasons that your traffic may not be converting well is a slow website. You have to remember that even though we live in the technological age, there are still many people who do not have broadband internet. It has nothing to do with affordability in most cases either, but instead it is usually the fact that there are still a lot of rural type areas in the US that have not yet been wired for broadband.
On top of that, yet another change is going on and that is a change from copper wired hookups to fiber-optic. So if your website is "heavy" with a boat load of images, and fancy flash gadgets and all the other bells and whistles that seem to drive webmasters these days, then you may be losing a lot of sales due to a slow loading website.
Most people will not set there and wait for all images to load, and flash objects and things like that. People these days are by nature in a hurry and if they have to wait for more than a few seconds for a page to load, they're going to move on. Let's get a little beyond the dial-up thing even. Suppose you have a visitor coming to your website and they are on a slow connection, and your website is on a slow server - this is a recipe for disaster because now, they have the dial-up issue AND additional time because your server is slow.
First of all, if you are on a slow server you need to consider moving ASAP. If you are on a broadband and your website is taking time to load, then your server is most definitely too slow. It's going to kill your business so what's more important - Saving $3.00 a month on hosting, or losing sales, not to mention the reputation that your site will build as being one that is slow to respond? So, first make sure that you have Fast and Reliable webhosting. Then follow these steps to increase your site speed:
- As we mentioned, a large number of graphics on your site will only serve to slow it down. Reduce the overall number of images on each page and you could increase site speed dramatically! Many sites have embedded graphics such as buttons, etc. Try to use the same ones on every page - it will help to speed the site up.
- Tell the browser the size of your images. Believe it or not it will help when you tell the browser how big the space needs to be when it is loading images.
- If you simply cannot cut down on the number of images, then make the top half of your pages as interesting and attention grabbing as you possibly can without weighing it down as well. This will try to help to keep the people on your website while they wait for it to fully load.
- Break your tables down into smaller ones. It's better to use many small ones than one large one. It will help in making the load time shorter. To elaborate even further, specify dimensions for the tables because just like the images, if you tell the browser how large to make the table(s), then it won't have to pause and figure out sizes. It works!
It's extremely important that you know how long it takes a webpage to load. As a general rule of thumb, it should be able to load in 20 seconds or less - obviously the faster it loads, the better off you are. The top half of your page really should be visible in less than 8 seconds. If you don't keep an eye on this, you could lose out on some serious revenue.
About this Author
John Derossett is a writer and online marketer and has been marketing online in various industries for more than 10 years. He and his wife own and Operate AllStar Marketing Association, Unique Website Content and several other similar websites.
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