Your website performance includes many elements affecting “digital relationships” with visitors, leads, and customers. Your site’s visitor experience directly affects search-related traffic, conversion of leads to sales, and the visitor’s perception of your business.
But factors such as SEO and user interfaces are often dealt with in isolation and often fail to deliver on their promise. Some companies offering services focus on one because it’s their bread and butter. Others offer design-centric services focused on the visual and flow of pages, menu structure, and others.
While these and others ARE important factors, what’s best for your business? How do you know what to tackle?
What makes a high performing website?
Understand that your website has many elements beyond the visible surface of design and content. As with physical health, factors that affect your business can often lurk quietly below the surface. Your website is the digital heartbeat of your business.
We believe in assessing the overall health of a website by evaluating seen and unseen factors that strengthen or weaken performance.
- The quality and volume of content affect how visitors perceive your site. Search rankings benefit from your content and particularly when you continue to add and refresh it.
- The speed and responsive nature of your site are also critical. Slow load times will result in visitors leaving. That is, more than a couple of seconds. A responsive site responds to different devices (mobile phones, tablets).
User Experience - The Flow
Operationally, you want the right integrations to your other business tools such as email marketing, social marketing, and tracking mechanisms. Reports are essential to understanding what’s happening to those visitors so you can make business decisions.
How much traffic are you receiving and successfully converting to customers?
As you can see, many moving parts contribute to a successful website. It’s more than pictures and paragraphs. Each contributor has a role to play and must work together.
Technical factors & web performance
Site construction quality can vary like anything else. Since this is a critical business support item, don’t just look for inexpensive solutions.
If you’re hiring outside developer, ask what tech they are using. WordPress is very common but what are the themes and plugins they suggest? Why? How will they be used? Are they well vetted and widely used? Using obscure, unproven plugins can lead to malware and other problems.
Website hosting options are everywhere. Too often, the focus is again on price. You want to find a mature company that offers a range of configurations and, perhaps most importantly, offers the ability to scale up as your business growth demands. You want to have an easy path to accommodate traffic and other needs associated with growth. If you or your developers have additional work to upgrade hosting capacity, this costs time and money.
Website speed factors
Here are some key factors to consider when evaluating the performance. Under the hood of your website’s technical underpinnings:
- Server load time
- Website design and coding – how long to your first-page display?
- Images and graphics – are they optimized for web displayed?
- Third-party scripts – too many can slow sites. Sometimes because you have too many WordPress plugins
- Website caching – A must-have usually provided by hosting company
- Browser caching – Another configurable option
- Redirects and broken links – Easy to correct by developer
- HTTP requests – another developer’s responsibility to control
- Server response time – key stat in evaluating your host
We won’t delve into the details of each because it would require multiple, incredible long posts. We will, however, explain briefly how to find and resolve issues with each and what to do.
How content contributes to website performance
Contact factors relate to the words you’ve written for the pages and blog posts. These are critical for getting “found” by the search engine and creating a compelling visitor experience.
- Length of the article/post
- The relevance of the article/post to the website
- The use of keywords in the article
- The number of times the article/post is shared on social media
- The quality of the writing
- The originality of the article/post
- The use of images and videos
- The number of links to other websites from the article
Start improving your website performance
Jambo Digital has created a unique approach to help you improve your website SEO, Content, and Speed performance. It starts with our Web Audit. We diagnose the issues and identify their priority for resolution.
Do you need technical help?
Improving the performance of your existing website doesn’t have to be complicated. Here’s how to get started
- Run our free web performance evaluation tool. You’ll receive detailed results within a half hour. It’s comprehensive and understandable.
- Use the information to work with your developer or do it yourself if you’ve tech-savvy.
- Arrange a conference with Jambo Digital to answer questions and get a free review of our services to help. No hard sell, just providing you with viable options to get your website performing better than ever.
Every day with a poorly performing website is likely costing valuable business and visitors.
Regular web audits are essential to ensure that your website runs smoothly and remains compliant with web performance standards. These audits can also help you identify and fix any problems. You can start yours here.
