Planning a Digital Marketing Promotion? Take This Website Speed Test First. Google estimates that 40 percent of people will leave a mobile site that takes longer than three seconds to load. How long does yours take? Find out now!
By Terry Rice Edited by Dan Bova
Entrepreneur Insider's Tip of the Day provides concise input on how you can improve aspects of your business or professional routines.
You spend time and money creating the right content to get your audience to visit your website. Unfortunately, a slow website can stop this whole process in its tracks. Google estimates that up to 40 percent of website visitors will leave a mobile website that takes longer than three seconds to load.
How long does your website take, and what can do you to speed it up? Fortunately, Google has a tool that will help with both. You can check it out here. Before you get started, it's important to note this tool will test your speed based on a 3G or 4G mobile connection. Your site will load much quicker on Wi-Fi. Beyond that, you'll typically want to test the speed of each page, which you can do via the Google Analytics Page Speed Report.
That said, let's take a look at my website.
Slow? I suppose "needs improvement" would have been a more polite way to say it. Either way, it is what it is. The majority of my traffic comes from desktop, but this is still something I'll address.
Fortunately, this tool provides tactic level advice for increasing speed. As is the case with my site, large images are a common culprit, they take longer to load. That hero image on top of your page may look good, but so does money. You'll need to either compress or remove if you want to speed things up.
Take a look at some of the other tools that are available as well. You can benchmark your speed against competitors or industry leaders. If you run an ecommerce site, you can evaluate how much money you may be losing due to your site speed.
In this scenario, a business could make another $18,000 per year by shaving three seconds off its load speed. Reducing speed by just a second is predicted to net another $4,000 in revenue. So, even if you need to hire a website developer, the incremental revenue could pay for their time.
As mentioned, this tool provides an estimate. If your campaigns are on Facebook or Instagram, you can easily find out exactly how much traffic you're losing from your ads. First, I'll need to provide a few quick definitions.
Link Click: This is when someone clicks on your ad, with the intention of leaving Facebook/Instagram.
Landing Page View: This is when the Facebook Pixel records a visit on your site.
Assuming your pixel is set up correctly, the delta between Link Clicks and Landing Page Views shows you how much traffic you've lost. Here's an example of how that will look.
Wow, more than 50 percent of traffic was lost. Sixty-six people saw this ad and said "looks cool, I'll take a look," but 37 of them said, "this is taking way too long, I'm out."
So there you have it, a quick way to estimate the amount of traffic you're losing on your site. No site is ever "perfect," but hopefully this provides input on how you can improve the overall efficiency.
Need some help with this, or have other digital marketing questions? Book a consulting session with me on Entrepreneur's Ask an Expert platform. My schedule is always up to date, and you can even record the meeting if you'd like. Hope to speak with you soon, and good luck with your next campaign!
