Why Your Website Is Repelling Visitors Faster Than A Blocked Toilet In A NYC McDonald’s

An Englishman Australian In New York 🎵

I’ll never forget whilst visiting the ‘Big Apple’ city back a few years ago, when after attending some business meetings and paying our respects to those lost on 9/11 at the memorial site we happened to chance upon a well-known restaurant chain outlet around midday feeling rather hungry.  

My colleagues and I went inside with a view of buying some lunch and I thought to use the restroom before ordering…

Bad move chief…

Alas, upon entering the small lobby preceding the restrooms, I was met by an older lady in a cleaner’s uniform holding on to a nasty-looking mop in one hand, and what looked to be a “now not so clean & only just used without success” plumber’s plunger in the other. The poor woman had a rather exasperated look on her face and with a strained voice croaked out…

“Sorry sir, I don’t think you can use… it’s…well..they’re choked very bad“

It became evident very quickly that she was referring to the current state of the toilets when I was hit by the powerful waft of an indescribable almighty stench coming from the direction of the men’s room that nearly knocked me over!

“Ok, sure ma’am“ I strangled in reply as I turned and hightailed it outta there.

There wasn’t a ghost of a chance anyone was gonna use that facility now and it’s safe to say the experience had seen our appetites suddenly disappear and us promptly leaving the restaurant without ordering.

True story.

Now, I get that this yarn is a bit on the nose (pun intended😏), but it’s the memory that came to mind while discussing this article’s subject content with our rockstar team. After I’d finished telling them the episode and with tears of laughter rolling down their cheeks, they insisted I included it.

The Most Common Thing That Kills A Website ☠️⚰️

Did you know that the #1 reason is that many websites end up with minimal conversions and alarmingly high bounce rates? It’s time it takes your website to load in a web browser. If it doesn’t work fast it will repel visitors quicker than a blocked toilet… It’s that simple!

You would have undoubtedly come across pixel-perfect websites online in the past that simply fell over when it came to living up to performance expectations? Sure, the site looked to have all the elements of an ideal website, such as a beautiful design, great content, and what looked to be a sensible  SEO strategy to attract the right audience and then…

FLUNK! 🤕💘

Visitors came and went without leaving hardly a trace…bounce rates hit the sky, and not even a hint of a conversion.

No, people don’t bother hanging around waiting for a slow website; they just leave.

According to a recent survey by Adobe, most internet users won’t engage with a website if it takes any more than a few seconds to load. It can be debated that slow and sluggish websites are right up there among the most hated things on the internet!

It’s an undeniable fact that your website only has seconds (in some cases milliseconds!) to capture your visitor’s attention and impress them enough to stay long enough to find enough reason to get to the next page! A blazingly fast website is vital to achieving this outcome.  

When developing a new website, it is actually quite common for site load time to be overlooked whilst the aesthetics and functionality take the front seat. You may initially think website speed isn’t a big deal but stop and consider that more than half of your visitors will vanish if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load. Your website’s crappy load time will substantially affect conversion rates and user engagement, leading to demoralising results. 

The good news is that with a little work and tweaking of the correct things, improving the load speed of your website is certainly not out of anyone’s reach. With careful consideration and attention to specific details, you can make your website fast and user-friendly.

Here Are Some Tips to Help You Improve the Speed of Your Site ⏱️👇

Use Minified Markup Files, Stylesheet and Javascript 🤏

While developing a website, developers use spaces and comments to make the coding clear to read and more concise for other developers to understand. However, it can also be detrimental to your website load speed if not managed correctly.  The way this is done so the developer’s code is concise and understandable without affecting the loading speed of your site by “minifying” the files that make up the back end of a website, such as CSS stylesheets, JavaScript, PHP etc.

Minifying the size of these files located in your website’s code will remove all unwanted spaces and unnecessary items from the background of its published pages. Minified files function perfectly whilst offering the benefit of reducing data file sizes, network bandwidth requirements, and, most importantly, load time.

Remove Unused Elements 🚫

Every element included inside a website’s Document Object Model (DOM) sends a request to the website’s server. The higher the number of elements on a site, the higher the number of requests there will be to the server, which slows down the time it takes to load up and display your website. Therefore, we must include only the essential elements on each webpage for it to function.

For example, a website may have components, such as CSS and javascript, on every page of the site, but it could be quite likely that these particular components may only be necessary on a few specific pages of your site. Also, a large portion of coding may have no function towards the initial rendering of the webpage, although it is all throughout the entire website. The solution here is to split the coding and only have it on web pages where it is necessary for their particular required functionality.

Google encourages developers as a best practice to split JavaScript into essential code sections that will render the webpage and initialise components first and then put everything else in separate files that will be loaded secondary.

Use Caching on Your Website 🗂️

When a user visits your website for the first time, their web browser downloads every element of the webpage. For subsequent visits to your site from the same browser, it greatly increases the speed at which it loads again by using a function known as “caching”. Using “caching” on your site saves the downloaded elements to the user’s browser for the next visit. It reduces the amount of content that needs to be loaded from the server, significantly reducing your website’s loading time.

 Insist on All Images Being Optimised 👌

Do you remember the last time you visited a website where you had to wait for an age for images to finally download and display? These websites use images that are too large in the number of bytes they are, which is the unit of digital data that the size of an image is measured by.

Large image files significantly impact the load time of a website in a negative manner due to the large amounts of data that must be served and downloaded to display the images. On the other hand, optimised images save large numbers of bytes without compromising on image quality. Therefore, you should always use optimised images on your website for better load speeds. A great free tool (for files under 5MB)  to achieve this optimisation is www.tinypng.com 

Choose a Fast Hosting Server ⚡

A hosting server is where your website is hosted or “lives’” on the internet. A fast hosting server delivers page requests faster, resulting in faster loading of websites. A fast server also means a quick response time for all the HTTP requests while the pages are loading. You should always research to determine the fastest hosting servers for your situation before choosing one. Some providers will entice you with extremely low pricing models only to deliver very poor performance due to sharing server capacity resources with many other customers.

Use External Platforms For Third-Party & Large Content 💪 

Using a content delivery network (CDN) and iframes for larger-sized or third-party content, such as videos, libraries for the gallery, sliders, etc., will reduce the number of page requests to the hosting server. A CDN is a network of geographically located servers working together to deliver content as fast as possible. Iframes on your website act as a “window” through to the applicable content original source rather than storing it on your website itself. As mentioned earlier, fewer page requests mean a better loading speed for your website. 

Reduce The Number Of Plugins On Your Website 🔌

Plugins are software additions that virtually plug into the framework of your website and allow for the customisation of your website’s features and content presentation.

While some plugins can be an excellent addition to your website as they help improve the user experience and add extra features, they also come with libraries for certain functionalities which use lots of resources and can send a ton of extra requests to the server.

Therefore, always remain vigilant when adding plugins to your site and only install the ones necessary. Limiting the number of plugins will reduce the server’s request volume, again improving its page speeds. Another thing to remember about plug-ins is that they regularly need to be updated to ensure they are the latest version developed. Otherwise, they will break, cease functioning, slow down your website, and become a serious security risk.

Use Lazy-Loading Functionality 🦥

Also called on-demand loading, lazy loading is an optimisation technique used for websites. Instead of loading the entire webpage when it is first visited, the lazy loading concept is about loading only the required section that the user is viewing on their screen and delaying the remaining sections until the user requires it. Lazy loading reduces time consumption and memory usage, enhancing content delivery and website speed. Feeding requested content faster means your website provides a better user experience, ultimately leading to better site performance.  

Make Your Website Responsive 📱

In today’s world, this is an absolute must. Google will actually penalise your website and rank it far lower than your competitors if your website isn’t mobile responsive. Apart from improving your website’s loading speed, responsive website design does a lot more for your website’s relationship with your visitors and search engines than you probably realise.

Ensuring your website is responsive will mean it is mobile-friendly, will improve how it looks on devices with large and small screens and will increase the time visitors spend on your site. It will also greatly help you improve your rankings in search engines.

Looking for Help to Plan, Design and Build a Beautiful and Lightning Fast Website That Attracts, Engages and Converts Leads Into Revenue?

The team at WEBO Digital is committed to creating high-performance websites that your target market loves to engage with to deliver you high-quality leads that produce maximum return on investment towards your business objectives and ultimately drive your bottom-line profitability.

The process begins with thoroughly focusing on understanding your business and its goals so that a highly detailed blueprint plan can be crafted that becomes the foundational pillar to delivering you a website that performs exactly how you and your business need it to. 

If this sounds like something you are looking for and would like to discuss how you can capitalise on your potential opportunity in the digital space then please don’t hesitate to contact us today.

You can and should read more on why planning and strategy are SO IMPORTANT to get your website done right in this in-depth article we wrote just for you here, or you can also download the PDF version below! 👇