For better or worse, we live in the age of instant gratification. People want their information at the click of a button and many no longer have the time or patience to wait for anything. Especially for a website to load.
According to an Akamai survey, a person will only wait three seconds for a page to load before they navigate to another page. More important, Sean Power found that 49 percent of users would abandon a site or switch to a competitor after experiencing performance issues.
Here are some tools to check website performance:
• PageSpeed Service – by analyzing the content of a website, this tool offers suggestions to help make your site run faster.
• WebPagetest – this tool provides information regarding the rendering speed of your website in real browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.
• YSlow – is a Firefox add-on which analyzes web pages and provides suggestions to improve overall performance, based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.
• SenSEO – is a Firefox add-on that allows you to check the most important on-page-SEO-criteria and calculates a grade of how good your site fulfills these criteria.
What if your website has become static? For someone who is unfamiliar with web development, spotting a static website can be difficult. A static page is one that looks basic and only delivers information without any special features.
On the other hand, a dynamic website includes more advanced features like a blog, shopping cart, news and articles. It is updated frequently with new content. And a dynamic site is a proven tool that generates sales leads and conversions.
Does your website get enough traffic? How long does a user stay on your site? What is your user conversion rate? Is your site generating real leads?
Google has developed a tool that can answer all these questions and more. Google Analytics measures your advertising return on investment (ROI). It can also track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.
Is there such a thing as too much search engine optimization? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Overly optimized websites suggest spam and run the risk of being penalized by Google. And for consumers, websites packed full of keywords are not appealing to read.
Google’s intentions were to “level the playing field” for websites that may have great content but mediocre SEO. Therefore, it’s important to find the proper balance between perfect and adequate SEO. (For more on SEO, read “Why Compelling, SEO-friendly Web Content is a Must”.)
If your website does not load quickly or lacks in overall performance you are significantly missing out when it comes to attracting new customers. Checking your website’s performance is easy—cheap, too. But if you’re not familiar with SEO or web standards, consult a professional. Because in today’s ever-changing digital landscape, nothing is worse than having a static, unproductive website.