Slow Website Loading Speed Can Kill Your Online Store Income

The loading speed of your website is one of the most important components in its user experience.  Your website’s performance, in terms of revenue, can be impacted severely if your website doesn’t load quickly.  You need to capture the website visitor’s attention from the outset.  If you don’t do so, you stand to lose considerable online store income.  In the words of Google, “Faster sites create happy users”.  If you want to see an increase in your online store income, it is important that your website loads fast. 

Numerous studies and research have shown that a slow website loading speed can kill your online store income.  It would drive away customers and lead to loss of reputation.  Over time, the traffic you attract to your website would also decrease, further hampering your bottom-line.  According to Amazon, improving your site’s loading speed by just 100m/s can lead to an increase in sales of 1%.  The numbers are staggering and quite clearly show that the loading speed of your website is going to have a direct impact on the profits of your online business. 

And it is not just by driving away customers that this occurs.  Once a person clicks away from your website in frustration (you can’t expect them to have any other feeling if they were waiting for your site to load and it didn’t!), they aren’t going to ‘recommend’ or ‘refer’ your business.  Rather, it is more likely that they dissuade people from shopping at your online store.  Consider this fact: they aren’t going to buy anything for themselves and will further harm your online store income. 

The only thing that you will see increasing is your website’s bounce rate, something every webmaster dreads.  If your business depends on visitors to stick around and make purchases, this is the last thing you would want to see.  Plus, you won’t attract repeat visitors anymore.  Even the channels through which you have been attracting visitors might put their hands up.  This would further reduce your online store income. 

Don’t be surprised if the average time people spend on your site increases.  This has nothing to do with the quality on offer. This is only because they have to wait longer for your website to load.  Even if the time spent on site increases, it won’t result in your online store income increasing.  Keep in mind that a person who has waited for your site to load before losing patience and leaving is going to be more frustrated than someone who just waited 2 seconds before clicking away.

This will impact your online store income even further if you have a mobile website.  As you would know, mobile connections are slower.  Therefore, your website would take even longer to load on a mobile device.  You will lose online store income from that platform too. 

As you can see, there is no light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to slow website loading speed. Unless you manage to improve it, it will kill your online store income.

ALT Tags and Descriptions: A Must for Website Income but a Nightmare for Maintenance

           The internet is a constant changing place.  There are always new and improved ways to do things.  Update and maintenance are never-ending tasks that must be done. Writing descriptions and adding ALT tags for smaller websites with fewer images are less of a concern and is not that bad of an undertaking.  However, when you run a big retail website with a lot of images and other elements, tracking down all the ALT tags and adding descriptions to make updates can be a nightmare for any webmaster. However, it is a necessary task to the overall website income. 

            ALT tags are alternative descriptions of an element that does not contain text. It is usually used for images.  Search engines cannot see nor know difference between one image from another.  ALT tags allow you to describe the images or give an alternative to just a picture.  Now, what does that have to do with your website income?  Well, an alternative to website searches are image searches.  The only way for Google or other search engines to find your images is by alt tags. By tagging and correctly describing each and every one of your images, you ensure that they end up on image searches. This will give you visibility, page rank, and revenue. 

            Webpage descriptions, or meta descriptions, are information written into the code of your website describing your website or webpage.  Each webpage has its own meta description.  A meta description is what searchers see when they look at the result page.  These are often short snippets describing your products or services.  This is often what will prompt a searcher to click on the link to enter your website.  These short descriptions are the only sales pitch you have to convince people to enter your website. Not every webpage needs a meta description, but in some circumstances a large website might need more than just one.  The task of writing an effective meta description could mean a higher click-through rate and a high website income. 

            ALT tags and descriptions are among the toughest tasks within building and maintaining a website.  However, it matters not how hard and tedious these two tasks may be, they are crucial to the success of your website.  With every update, with every passing month or year, tracking them down to update or do any changes can cause a lot of sweat and moans. But, if these tasks are not done or not done well, it could result in a drop in your website income. 

           

            Do not let any small or large task get in the way of your website bringing in revenue.  When it comes to online marketing or keeping your number one place in search results, staying updated and relevant is vital.  Learn and understand how to write good meta description for your webpages and stay updated on all of your ALT tags. Then, watch how it will affect your yearly or monthly revenue statement. 

Do Broken Links Alter Website Revenue?

Broken links reflect negatively on your website and your company.  A website full of broken links will reflect poorly on your professionalism to potential customers which then gives them reason to buy from someone else and reduces your website revenue.

If you have broken links it will reduce your hard-earned rank among popular search engines and your potential for increased website revenue.  While you may not view a broken link here or there as a big deal, people who save links or bookmark them for future reference do.  By leaving broken links on your website you are creating a bad user experience for a large customer base.  Search engines will take note of this.  They want to provide customers with the best possible information and a great user experience. If you have broken links on your website, it will severely damage your reputation with the search engines. This makes your company website less desirable which decreases your rank and your potential for any website revenue.

Therefore, it is imperative that you fix any broken links regularly to improve website revenue.  Link checking can be an incredible chore, unless you only have a handful of pages on your website with under a dozen links.  The benefits of checking and fixing broken links may not offer instant gratification, but over the long haul it is well worth the investment.

Benefits to Fixing Broken Links

Broken links make your website look bad.  A visitor will think that your website is untended and that it may be quite old or otherwise neglected.  This will reflect poorly on your services too.  When a reader clicks a link on your website and it results in a 404 error page, it makes the reader think that your company does not care about the content on the website or the customers.  Removing these broken links will ensure your readers are happy and more willing to buy.

Having valid links on your website helps the Google spiders navigate your website.  This is an integral part of SEO.  You need to make sure that the web crawlers associated with these search engines can easily navigate your website so that they can index it.  If you have broken links, then the web crawling spiders will not be able to follow them.  When you update your pages and correct broken links you also improve SEO and increase website revenue.  Search engines know when you make changes to your web pages and will come back to re-crawl and see if anything on the listing needs to be changed.  When you regularly fix any broken links your website looks like it being regularly maintained which increase your rank.

Overall it is in the best interest of your company to regularly scan your website to find and fix broken links.  Doing this regularly will increase your rank and improve your potential for website revenue.  If your website is small with only a few pages and links you can manually check the links regularly, but if the website is large you can turn to professional sources for automatic scans.

The High Cost of Poor Coding

In light of the "browser wars," it will come as no secret that there is more than one browser out there in use. Those who visit and read our websites will use a wide range of different operating systems and browsers. Just a few of those with which our readers and prospective customers use to surf the internet and browse websites include Safari, Google Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Avant.

If you review a given website in any of those browsers, you may find that it will render differently in several of them. Every browser will parse code in a different way. Some elements of design are compatible with only one or two browsers and are unable to be viewed in other browsers. What does your website look like in those browsers? Is cross-browser compatibility an issue for your website??

If that's a question that you haven't asked, then it's time to broach the subject. If your bounce rate is up, your conversions are down, or your traffic is dropping, it may be that you need to take a long look at your website design. Cross-browser compatibility is an important part of site design and one that will ensure that your website does the job of marketing your products or services.

That new website may cost a little to implement, but it's a paltry sum compared to what a site that does not function in every browser can cost you. You lose integrity, reputation and money when your website is inoperable or invisible in some browsers. 

How Can You Test the Website? 

If you'd like to test your own website for cross-browser compatibility, your first and best means to do that is to download the three most popular browsers and simply take a look at your website.

When you review your own website, check it in more than one browser, what kind of view is returned to you? Does every element work? Does your navigation render correctly and does the text and imagery display well in every browser that you use to review it?

A much easier, simpler way to check cross-browser compatibility is to hire a website monitoring company.  The biggest benefit is time; website monitoring companies produce reports from across multiple browsers and show you where the trouble lies.  They don’t do it for every browser, but they report on browser compatibility for the most used (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc.) which covers 96%+ of your target audience.  Most website monitoring companies also detect other errors in your website, including SEO checks, spelling errors, and site load speed.  All of these are a necessity to ensure an optimal gain in website revenue.   

Bear in mind that there will always be some browsers that won't work with a given element of any website.  That fact in and of itself does not make the website design poor or incorrect. There will always be the elusive browser with the .005% market share for which you simply can't afford to design. Overall however, your website should be able to be seen and render correctly in the top three browsers.

If your website is non-functional in even one out of the top three browsers, you are losing clients and you are losing money. It's time to review the site for an overhaul and to select a designer who can guarantee cross browser compatibility when your new site is built.

Web Alert slated to launch Nov 15th

Good news!!