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/

An SMTP Server: What is it?

When an email is sent to a recipient, the recipient of the email is automatically interacting with something called the SMTP server. The SMTP server is the part of the email process that takes care of the sending. The SMTP server of your email service interacts with other SMTP servers to get the job done.

Every SMTP server has a type of the Simple Mail Transport Protocol. These servers often run the Unix program to send mail. Every message that is sent is required to move through a number of servers in order to reach their final destinations. It is the SMTP that takes charge of this action.

How Do I Find My SMTP Server?

In many instances, email users will need to find out their SMTP identifications in order to set up an email client on a device. Almost every server is written as “smtp.domain.com” There are also cases where the server is written as, the server is written as “mail.domain.com” Because there are a variety of ways to write out a server name, users should pay close attention to get the correct SMTP parameters.

There are a number of different ways to find out your SMTP parameter. There are many websites on the internet that list common providers. These lists will give the URL and settings so that users can find the parameters of their email service quickly, and easily. If the email provider is fairly unknown, or local, then you can find out the parameters by looking at the provider’s website. Parameters can also be easily acquired by contacting the company directly (through phone or email). You can also perform load testing on your SMTP server to ensure that it’s working properly and can handle the expected demand of users sending and receiving mail at the same time. According to WebHostingProf.com, it makes a difference also whether or not you’re using a good host in terms of the speed at which mail is sent and received. Hosting credibility is also a factor, so consider dedicated or managed hosting rather than a standard shared hosting solution.

There is only a full guarantee of delivery when a professional SMTP service is used. It is not recommended to use free email services when sending mass emails out to important recipients such as emergency contacts, or clients.

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol was first officially defined as a standard to the internet in 1982. The RFC was the organization that founded the SMTP. The standard was most recently updated in the year 2008. The Extended SMTP additions were added by the RFC during this time.

Recommended Reading: 5 Ways Website Page Speed Affects Marketing

Avoiding Exchange Server Problems: Can Monitoring Help?

If you run an Exchange Server, you will want to monitor it all the time. If you don’t, not only will you put your organization at risk, but you will waste plenty of time and money fixing long-term issues. With this in mind, you need to monitor your Exchange server. Here are three ways in which monitoring an Exchange Server can help you avoid problems.

Speed things up quickly: Without a doubt, if you don’t monitor your server, you will deal with speed problems in the future. Think about it, if your employees send out large files or make mistakes when using the server, it will slow down for others. Not only that, if a hacker or mischievous person accesses the network, he or she may slow down the server. However, once you check up on this and fix the issue, you can save yourself plenty of frustration. Remember, servers will slow down over time; if you want to speed it up, you must monitor it all the time.

Secure and safe: If a hacker hops on your server and steals your bandwidth, you will end up in a bad situation. Since a hacker can send emails to hundreds of thousands of people, you will watch as your server is banned. Instead, with a proactive approach, you can catch a hacker in action. Then, you can ban him or her from the server and take any other steps. Simply put, if you watch as a hacker steals your bandwidth, you will deal with a PR nightmare. Fortunately, with a common sense approach, you won’t need to worry too much.

Plan for the future of your organization: Now, when you own and run an Exchange Server, you will need to spend money and time in the future to fix it up. Luckily, if you monitor the server all the time, you can spot issues before they arise. Using a good exchange server management solution can be a first step in the right direction, in helping you keep tabs on your server. Otherwise if you don’t keep tabs on your server, if you watch the server gradually slow, you will end up with an annoying issue on your hands. There are a number of third party products that may be able to help you keep track of an exchange server such as Dotcom-Monitor’s exchange server monitoring solution, and Solarwinds monitoring suite. There are also a lot more than what’s listed here, but these are some of the options that are available.

If you own an Exchange Server, make sure to watch it constantly via server monitoring. When doing so, you will save yourself time and money now and in the future.

Why SLAs are Important Documents

A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract that formally defines a service. In reality, this agreement usually defines when a service is going to be delivered. For example, an Internet service provider and telephone companies usually have an SLA when they make a contract to ensure that the levels of service are defined. Within the SLA, there will be technical terms like mean time between failures (MTBF) and mean time to recovery (MTR).

An SLA usually takes place between two parties. One party is a client and the other party is a service provider. This agreement can be quite formal or informal such as within a department. People mistakenly think that an agreement with a third party could be a SLA as well. A SLA can never be made with a third party. A SLA must be made directly with a customer.

There are very different parts of a SLA. The parts are a definition of services, performance measures, problem management, customer duties, warranties, disaster recovery and termination of agreement. To make sure that SLAs are followed, the agreements are created with very specifically divided and the parties involved in the SLA are often invited to have a forum for communication. Rewards and penalties can be strictly enforced. SLAs usually have room for annual review of the issues regarding the SLA. The SLA practice became so widespread that it is very common now for a customer to interact with a service provider by including s SLA in many different kinds of service contracts in all industries and markets. Within departments of organizations, they make SLAs with their internal customers of the organization. SLAs are a good way to benchmark the quality of the organization.
SLAs are considered to be the output kind of contracts since the result of the service comes due to SLA. The service provider can show the value of the agreement by organizing themselves to deliver the service required by the SLA. The SLA can define how the organization delivers the service. Defining the service makes it an input SLA.
There are distinctive kinds of SLAs. If it’s important that you need to hold a web hosting company to an SLA, then it may be a good idea to consider some kind of a SLA management suite that can allow you to monitor uptime and downtime in order to know how well a web host is keeping up their end of the SLA.

One kind of SLA is customer-based. This agreement is with an individual customer group. A service-based SLA is an agreement between customers and a service. Multilevel SLA is an agreement that has different levels with a multiple sets of customers for the same services. SLA is an important aspect of the contract and should be carefully read.