Website Performance and Its Impact on Your Digital Marketing and Overall Business

Slow websites are one of the more frustrating things on the internet. You cannot afford a slow website because it can impact your SEO, user retention, and bottom line. A faster website is crucial in digital market and your business, impacting both significantly.

Faster Speeds Lead to a Better User Experience

As internet speeds have increased, people now expect websites to load quickly. Most users prefer sites that load in just a few seconds. In fact, many people will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. The frustration from a slow website leads users to bounce or exit the page before engaging with the content.

Faster websites provide a much better user experience, keep visitors engaged, and give them more time to see your message and offerings. It can, therefore, increase conversion rates if the content on the website is also well-crafted to improve user experience further and give them what they need when they land on your website.

It Improves Credibility and Brand Perception

You typically have one opportunity to create a great impression in the minds of your visitors. As visiting your website is one of the first ways people interact with your business, it becomes a crucial tool for creating trust among your visitors. You do not want your business to be seen as not caring about user experience that makes people like your business, so ensure it loads faster.

Several studies have shown that businesses with fast and well-functioning websites are perceived as more credible by visitors and customers.

Your website should also remain performant in the age of chatbots, high-res images, and videos. All these add load to your website and can cause it to open slowly if you do not configure your website properly. The problem might also be your hosting provider who is using outdated hard drives instead of solid-state storage drives.

It is a good idea to consider cloud hosting providers who employ SSDs and robust content delivery networks to ensure your websites perform as excited regardless of your visitors’ locations and the functionalities you have added to them. The infrastructure provided by providers like Gcore, including their distributed CDN infrastructure, means your website will remain performant across the globe.

These types of infrastructure also mean your website will scale as the number of visitors increases. The customer does not care if there are a million other people using the website at the same time. All they care about is their experience and whether your website performs well for them. A scaling infrastructure ensures there is no degraded performance regardless of the number of visitors, ensuring a great user experience and helping improve credibility and brand perception.

Website Speeds Impact SEO

SEO is a crucial part of digital marketing because it puts your business in front of the right people in search engine result pages. Google announced in 2010 that it would change how it evaluated websites and their performance. It said it would prioritise websites that loaded faster and performed better because user experience is important to visitors who reach these websites from the search results.

All this means that businesses must ensure their websites load as fast as possible for all visitors, whether on mobile or desktop. The websites should also ensure visitors see the content they need as fast as possible, typically above the fold. Google’s intention with these provisions is that visitors are not frustrated by the results they get and end up blaming the company for directing them to websites that do not serve their needs.

A Performant Websites Reduces Marketing Costs

Many businesses pay for ads on the internet. These ads lead to landing pages where the business tries to convince visitors to take the desired actions. Paid search and ads cost a lot of money, and businesses want to get a return on these investments.

All this means that crafting the best ads is only half the equation; the other is ensuring these ads lead to conversions and revenues. The latter happens on your landing pages. If the landing pages are slow or do not perform as expected, your visitors will leave and you will have wasted the money you used to get them to visit the landing page in the first place.

Reduce bounce rates, provide a great user experience, and increase clicks on your class to action by ensuring your website performs well and provides an excellent user experience.

It Supports Personalisation

Personalisation is vital in digital marketing because people are more likely to perform the desired actions if they feel like the business is talking directly to them and catering to their specific needs. Personalisation remains the best way to do this.

You may not realise it requires a lot of data collection and processing. Businesses must collect data on user behaviour, browsing patterns, preferences, past purchases, and other data that tells the business what they like and are likely to respond to.

Once processed, the business has to provide the right content or include little bits of personalisation like the visitor’s name throughout the website. All this takes a lot of computing power, which means the servers doing the heavy lifting has to be up to the task. The website has to also serve the personalised content quickly regardless of what else is happening on the page.

Support for New Technologies

Many businesses are leveraging new technologies, such as AI chatbots, to provide better user experience and customer service. The main challenge with these solutions is that they can degrade website performance if they are not set up correctly. However, websites that already perform well see a much lower performance degradation when these services are added.

This means making your website perform can help you include new technologies that support your marketing efforts and help improve your bottom line.

Website performance has been an ongoing point of discussion for developers and businesses for the last two decades. With faster internet speeds and heightened visitor expectations, businesses cannot afford websites that do not perform as expected or provide a poor user experience. Businesses should find areas of improvement and rectify all issues that could degrade website performance to ensure it remains a viable tool in their marketing efforts and overall business.