5 Ways Website Page Speed Affects Marketing

The key to marketing in the 21st century may not be what most predicted. With the rise of ever-more-precise demographics and targeted ads, the world of promoted commerce understandably presumed the process of selling a product in the age of social media would be to point the right ad at the right customer.

Unfortunately, as with most things in business, it didn’t turn out to be quite that simple. As the big advertising platforms have demonstrated over the past few years, just putting an ad in front of someone isn’t necessarily the best way to sell something. If that were true, surely the trillions spent on wall-to-wall marketing during the last 70 years of the 20th century would have produced better results instead of three recessions and a depression. Granted a lot of money was made, but by the 70s, marketers relied on branding, entertainment value, word of mouth and more than a little inertia to keep their products moving off the shelves. With the exception of Saturday morning cartoons, narrowly targeting the “right” customer was rarely the answer.

Now, anyone interested in marketing needs to evaluate other factors, and one of the most crucial is the quality and speed of their web site. Gone are the days when customers will wait patiently. There are simply too many alternatives that have no delays, including the 800-pound gorilla search engine, which brings us to our first point.

1. Speed Affects Search, and Search Affects Marketing

Google, and to a certain extent other search engines, continually recommend web sites improve their speed and efficiency1. Their stated goal, naturally, is to improve the experience for their users, which is understandable. People are unlikely to tolerate sub-standard search results for long, and if search engines find themselves recommending sites that take too long to load, their users will go elsewhere.

Any web site operator should take this principle into consideration. If the major search engines insist on speed, it might be important.

2. Responsive Design

It was not all that long ago that mobile eclipsed desktop as the primary means by which web audiences accomplish two things. First, mobile is now the dominant e-commerce platform. Second, mobile is now the dominant search platform. Having a site that loads slowly on mobile devices will have the same effect as it does on desktop.

Responsive design is the engineering by which mobile sites compete with desktop. It is clear a low-cost mobile phone simply cannot drive the kind of data that even a moderately equipped PC can. That is why sites have to be optimized to load quickly, because mobile is where the customers are, and reaching those customers requires a snappy site that can be reached on any device.

3. Attention Span

Anyone who has invested even a rudimentary effort in studying web advertising knows the average “new” thing on the web has about eight seconds to get someone’s attention. This is why so much of the Internet now depends on provocative headlines and gossipy subject matter.

It doesn’t take much to imagine how an audience with an eight-second attention span is likely to react to a slow-loading web site. They would be likely to respond in much the same way the site’s developer would react to poor results from a tool like the Dotcom Tools Speed Test. In a world where the next video, social media notification, text, Internet controversy or political argument is only a click away, slow might as well be invisible.

The worst part of the attention span short-circuit is it will tempt marketers to conclude there is something wrong with their product, pitch, or marketing materials, when in reality it is something far more fundamental: Their site won’t load.

4. Marketing is the Message

Everyone has experienced that moment when you are trying to have a conversation with someone who is constantly being distracted by some outside influence. A great example is a parent with small children. Kids are hardwired to recognize when they aren’t their parents’ top priority and are further wired to regain that attention at all costs. This is one reason why young mothers can’t use a telephone until their kids are in junior high school.

A slow loading web site is the four-year-old child between you and your customer, and that child is on a mission to disrupt your message in any way they can. Imagine you’re about to perform your big close, and your site chooses that moment to go blank and display a spinning loading icon. Everything you’ve invested up to that point is disrupted. Even if you had the chance to start over, your conversion rate has been pulverized.

You need to remember you’re competing with two billion other sites. You don’t have the luxury of letting closes get away. Speed is everything.

5. Credibility

Web users have come to recognize speed as a signal of professionalism, reliability, and trust. Sites that load quickly become popular, because audiences know they will always be there, and they will always be lightning fast.

If you’re selling something, establishing that trust as early as you possibly can is the foundation upon which all is built. If customers view speed as reliable, how do you think they will respond to a slow site? If they trust a fast-loading site, what will they think when your site is sluggish and appears broken?

No marketer would dream of trying to sell a product to someone who doesn’t trust them, yet that is exactly what web sites do when they invite customers to a page that takes forever to load. Often times a low quality web host will prevent your site from loading fast 2. Resources like WebHostingProf point out the importance of choosing the right web host for your website, to optimize server performance and web page speed.

Far too many business-people fall prey to the belief that their lack of success has to do with complex issues and huge, insurmountable problems. The best way to work through these often mistaken beliefs is to remember it’s never as complicated as you think, and at the same time it’s never as simple as you think either. Chances are if something is broken, it’s a basic problem, and the reason it hasn’t been fixed yet is because everyone is searching high and low for the over-complicated alternative.

Web sites that rely on greasy-fast speed and a simple, effective marketing message are the ones most likely to get traction. From there, it’s just a matter of improvements and adjustments.

 

References

1. https://developers.google.com/speed/
2. https://webhostingprof.com/fastest-web-hosting-providers/