Rethink your business website
A website isn’t sound as special as in the old days, even a cat has a website now, but in my opinion, some business websites even not better than cats. You must experience that when you want to buy something but the web page loading slowly and you close it in final or when you want to download some manual or driver software a 404 or blank page shows.
As a non-technical background person, how should you start your website? where should be the focus? how to validate if a website work is qualified? this article will give you some inspiration.
Organizing your copywriting
Of course, everyone knows copywriting is important, I see a lot of copywriting which details and touching, and can all be a summary of our products/services are great. All those scripts are mostly from the business owner and you can even feel the ambition and desire from the text, but sadly, most of the customers just won’t bite it.
I did the same mistake when I run my first Facebook ad. I wrote a lot about my printing service, which tells the high-end equipment and the branded Ink and materials I used. I have big ambitions with the ad but long story short I got worse conversations from that ad.
After some reversions, I found that people don’t care about your gorgeous speech they won’t give you that much time, you have only less than 1 second to catch their eyes and after that, they will only give you less than 3 seconds to let them know what you do(they don’t even want to know who you are before they have the interest on your products or services).
The same thing goes with the website.
Most people want their website as detailed as it needs, it’s correct but not on the home page. use simple words to tell the users what you do in 2 seconds(about 12-20 words) and then use another 3 seconds(about 18 -30 words) to explain why they should choose you. Don’t waste your time on “who I am”, if the users want to know, they can find it on the contact page. if the users’ are interested in your products and services they can find details on the product/service page.
I have tested these rules on more than 10 businesses’ websites and all the websites see a conversational improvement in the short or long term.
Web speed is your first consideration
I was placed this section at the beginning of the article, but in final, I decided to talk about copywriting first, it’s not because this section is not important but it’s too important that I want to use more words to describe it.
Some cold data
There’s a list of research that can prove to you that web speed matters more than everything, you can simply find them from Google, however, I will list some here as a quick reference.
Mobify found that decreasing their homepage’s load time by 100 milliseconds resulted in a 1.11% uptick in session-based conversion
Retailer AutoAnything experienced a 12-13% increase in sales after cutting page load time in half
Walmart discovered that improving page load time by one second increased conversions by 2%
BBC discovered that they lost 10% of their total users for every additional second it took for their pages to load.
Let me start from a real story
Back in 2018, the day my friend Kika came to show me her body cream ad, it was well scripting and shooting, I’m not sure how much she paid for the ad shooting but I still remember how beautiful the model was in that ad.
The ad is great, and she got 7.4% CTR on Youtube. She also had someone make a good-looking landing page, well-copywriting, and cool photos.
However, she got only 0.31% CVR in the first week’s ad delivery, she lose money, and she’s in a bad mood and wants to know why.
I was wondering the same question until I open her landing page using my phone in the park and I get the reason - the page loading speed. it takes me more than 7s to get the page to show me the content, will the customers wait for 7s? Absolutely no.
The common issues
The best situation is when a user opens your link, your website could be opened instantly. but under the current technology background, it is still not possible, what we can do is improve the loading time by short the affection of different factors.
In 2021, 95 percent of the world population was estimated to be covered by at least a 3G. but the fact is as a developer you still can not assume that all the users have a high-speed internet connection.
How fast of 3G? the theoretical value is 3 megabits, which means if your website has a total resource size of 1MB, it will take 3 seconds to load it. most of the modern size is larger than 1MB and if your developer doesn’t do optimization on the assets’ file sizes, it will significantly increase the transfer size.
The story I told you above is not a single case, it’s very common in those days since as a non-technology person, you are unlikely to review the code’s quality. so some of the developers won’t spend the time on the optimization. “see your website is ready, all show same as you requested”.
It’s hard to say whether this is right or wrong, cause most of these cases come from a tight budget, we are all the same, we want to spend less but get more, even though we all know deeply it’s not possible. However, after I worked on advertising I see those behaviors as an occupational crime, the client may lose hundreds of thousands on advertising using a low-performance website, and sometimes the customers hardly know it.
Some people(developer) say we don’t need to worry about the internet speed like we don’t need to worry about the performance. it only goes theoretically.
Moore’s Law still works, but the technologies bring us more complex logic and also consume more hardware resources. My first computer’s hard drive has only a size of 380MB, and Windows 11 required 64GB of free space to make the installation.
In the past decade, average web page weight has grown a whopping 356 percent, from an average of about 484 kilobytes to 2,205 kilobytes. The average internet speed in 2010 in the US is 5.1 Mbps and 119.03Mbps in 2022, at this point, seems the internet speed growth isn’t catching up with the page weight’s growth.
What I want to say is we can not put all our hopes on the improvement of technology, business focuses on the current, the marketing also won’t wait for you.
What you can do?
The easy and effective way is to ask for the source code and pass it to someone to make a review.
But I know not everyone has those connections or resources, so here are some options you can try.
Ask for the source codes
I see a lot of clients lose their website because they are not asking for the source code when the work is done, it could be an archived file or a Git repository with the access right.
Don’t skip this just because you are thinking you don’t know about coding. In another hand, when the developer knows you want the source code they may more careful when they are coding.
PageSpeed Insights tool
Google has made us a tool to check the web speed and identity some basic issues, go https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and input your website’s domain name to see the result.
Don’t panic if your website doesn’t get a 100(even Google only gets 70) but you should expect a high score(90-100) on Best Practices and SEO.
Test your website’s loading time
Although the page speed insights tool will give your an estimated time but nothing better than trying it out and feeling yourself.
Using Google Chrome on a PC or Mac you can do this job yourself.
Open your website using Google Chrome and using the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + C open the DevTools(I know you are not a developer but don’t panic), switch to the Network tab and select a connection profile the try to reload your website.
I select the slow 3G in the picture, but in most situations, you can try with Fast 3G option.
Make sure the analysis codes installed
Every website should have an analysis code installed, if you don’t know how to choose then just try Google Analytics, Start with Google Tag it’s very easy to install it yourself.
By installing the analysis code, your website is integrated with the analysis service, so you can visualize the guest and pageviews of your site. You may need some advanced knowledge to find the value of the report, but gathering the data from the start is the best practice.
Conclusion
In the end, I’m asking myself, why I spent hours writing this article? I think it is because I see so many people underestimate the importance of the website.
Today, a website is basically the foundation of your business. I see people hiring full-time jobs to maintain their social media but don’t want to spend hours improving their website’s performance and accessibility. I know why, it’s because it’s easier to see growth on social media but to know what’s going on on your website requires advanced and complex knowledge and skill. It’s just like advertising on social media, it’s easier to get started but in most cases, Google can bring you more results if you go deep with it.
References
Global Peak Internet Speeds Up by 30 Percent in 2010 | Enterprise Networking Planet
The 10 Fastest and Slowest States for Internet Speeds in 2022 | HighSpeedInternet.com