Every day I provide digital marketing consulting advice to business owners especially when it comes to understanding digital marketing for their business. Quite rightly they don’t have the skills or expertise to understand the impacts that can be caused when they make changes to their website.
In this example the business owner thought they were doing the right thing by installing a booking form and calendar service on their website. The goal was to make the customer experience better, smoother & easier which is a great strategy to pursue. Although what the business owner didn’t realise is how it would impact the performance of their website.
Learn more about what happened in the digital marketing example below. I can help your business avoid this situation by doing an audit on website performance vs any agency services being promised. Learn more here
WHY IS WEBSITE SPEED IMPORTANT FOR A BUSINESS?
GOOGLE USES THE SPEED OF A BUSINESS WEBSITE TO DETERMINE YOUR RANK
BEFORE
I was engaged by this small business owner to build a new website for their brand. The old site was built on WordPress but had a very limiting page structure that didn’t make it easy for the owner to make changes. Part of their brief for the new website was the ability to make their own changes as required so they could promote their range of services as they evolved over time.
With that in mind, as a digital marketing consultant in Sydney I was able to create a new website using WordPress as the CMS that used the popular Elementor page building tool. This would make it easy for the business owner to make updates or changes to the site and save costs on hiring developers to create custom code or pages.
The other area that I concentrated on was to make sure this business website was fast, especially when people were using it on a mobile phone. As far back as 2018, Google has used page loading speed as one of its many ranking factors it applies to every business website to determine which sites are shown in search results. To make sure the business owner knew their site was performing well I provided the screenshot above as reference for them which was taken after the new site was launched.
Any business owner can use the free Google PageSpeed Insights tool to check their site performs on Mobile or Desktop. By Google’s own admission this does not guarantee a site will rank well if it achieves 100/100 but it will give you an indication of how their algorithms measure your site. In this example the home page scored well with 86/100 for Mobile users and slightly higher for Desktop. So the business owner had a good platform to build from.
Why business owners should be careful what they add to their site
AFTER
The owner engaged an online service provider who had a Calendar and Booking service that made it easy for customers to find available dates, book and pay for things. Implementing something like this makes sense as it can improve the customer experience and make it quicker to convert visitors into actual clients with bookings.
Although, what the company didn’t explain to the business owner was the impact the implementation would have on the website’s loading speed.
As you can see in the new Google PageSpeed Insights test, the site now scores below fifty and the change is due to the code that was added to the site from the Calendar and Booking service. The way the code works is that it has to go and get information from the service and then help it load on the website. This of course takes time as both sites have to ‘talk’ to each other and it effects the speed at which the site can fully load and be ready to be used.
HOW CAN A BUSINESS OWNER CHOOSE THE RIGHT THINGS TO ADD TO THEIR WEBSITE
Any business owner should engage a digital marketing consultant before approving items to be added to their website. This could be something as simple as changing headings or text, URL names or adding/removing things like plug ins on a WordPress website.
The reasons for this are;
- Removing content from the site can change the structure and on page SEO set up of the site which can lead to impacts to search performance.
- Changing URL naming can lead to broken links, lost backlinks and broken menu structures.
- Adding plug ins or external code can cause conflicts on the website, slow the site down or cause other functionality issues if not tested correctly.
- The visitor experience might change if the pages or layouts don’t function correctly on laptop, desktop or mobile phone.
