8 Principles of Good Website Design
June 13, 2019
Compliance with formal guidelines, privacy regulations and Cyber Security
July 23, 2019
As the title suggests, your content has to load fast to keep visitors on your site. A fast loading site needs to be the standard for any device be it desktop, phone or tablet.
To be specific, your content “above the fold” (before scrolling) should load within 3 seconds (max) within being clicked on or typed into the browser.
According to Unbounce:
- If your website takes about 100 milliseconds longer to load than usual, your conversion rate might face a 7% decline.
- Pages with 5s load time have about five times the bounce rate compared to those with a 2s load time.
- 73% of mobile users have experienced websites that take too long to load.
HostingTribunal, a company that specialises in network hosting evaluation, has also weighed in, reporting that for an online store that generates $100,000 in daily revenue, a delay of 1 second can potentially lead to a $2.5 million in missed revenue annually.
It pays to be fast! So if you’re sat wondering “how can I make my website faster?”; to be honest, that’s a topic that requires a whole other article to itself.
As internet connection and telecom continues to improve, the attention span and patience of your website visitor’s decreases. As mentioned above, if your website can’t keep up, then your profit is going to plummet!
Make your website easy to locate
While not as directly involved with the content of your site as you may have already guessed, your website needs to be locatable using Google (or any other search engine).
So let’s say you have a website either selling or promoting motorbikes, when a person googles “motorbike” or anything related to the query, your page needs to rank in the top 5 of the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages).
This allows people to easily find your site and develop a favourable impression providing it’s designed with our tips in mind and is easy to use. Leaving a good impression on visitors can lead to a positive reviewon social media or a recommendation to a family member or friend.
The good press will lead to a spike in organic traffic, more profit and more time spent on your website.
A perfect parallel, in this case, would be a brick-and-mortar shop. If you’re looking for repairs, it’s unlikely you’ll ever go beyond the first page of search engine results.
When it comes to the type of content that increases your website’s visibility easy to find links to social media is a must.
Socials can include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram pages as current social media users have reached up to 3.5 billion as of 2019.
That means that your business or content needs to have active social media accounts as many of your potential leads/customers will find you there. So if your website links to your socials and vice versa, it will only result in more visitors (and more leads).
If you want to learn about techniques to rank your website among the top in google, then please read this article and if that doesn’t sate your desire try this article from HootSuite.
