It is asking too much to expect them to sit around, waiting for your slow site to load. People who visit your site for the first time are not your loyal customers. They are potential clients, with other service opportunities to check out. They were interested enough to visit your site. But don’t overestimate the amount of interest that requires.
If your site loads slower, on average, than the ones they are used to visiting, then from their perspective, your site has a problem. That is not the kind of first impression you want to make on someone who is not your loyal customer. It is like having a storefront with a door that is really difficult to open. Very few people are going to put forth the effort, especially if there are other, easier doors to open on either side of your shop. What you need are faster load times. Here are a few easy ways to make it happen:
Get Faster Internet
If you are serving up your own small business website, you had better be sure you have a fast enough connection to get the job done. What you need is a business-class connection and a virtual server. What you have may be dial-up in the rurals. You will need to switch to a service that specializes in providing fast internet service to people in rural areas and small communities. That is why many people get Frontier in California. Not everyone out West lives in a big city. You will have to check your local area for that type of service provider near you.
Use Fewer Graphics
When you are creating your ecommerce site from scratch, you may have the urge to fill it with every product photo you can fit on the page. This is one urge you need to fight and conquer. There are appropriate ways and places on a site to display product photos and other types of photo galleries. Your landing page is not one of them. That page needs to be as simple and uncluttered as necessary to get your prospect progressing to the next step. Don’t try to throw everything at them on the front page. Even if other pages are a bit slow to load, that one never should be.
Reduce the Number and Size of Ads
If you find yourself asking how much of your landing page you can cover with ads, you are asking the wrong question. Even if you are a blog with a business model that monetizes viewer attention by selling ads, you can still over do it.
It is one thing to have a handful of small, tasteful, well-placed ads at key points on your page. It is quite another to have to page be a giant wall of ads, with consumable content lightly interspersed. That is the state of many popular blogs. There is only enough content to support the page of ads.
As if that was not enough, there are expanding ads that take over the page. There are mouse-overs that popup if the user was careless enough to let the mouse pointer pass over that particular spot on the page. There are video ads that automatically play when the page is loaded. All of these ads eat up machine resources. Your page is slow because of all those ads. There are few things more annoying than visiting a site where you have to wait for all the ads to load before getting your moral of content. Your visitors will not than you for it.
As you can see, increasing your load time can be a simple matter. You do not have to recode your site to enhance user experience. Most of the time, it is just a matter of remembering that the end user is the client. Everything else is secondary.
