Does your website take more than 20 or 30 seconds to download?
Then you lose customers. Lots of customers.
It’s a well-known fact in marketing circles that web surfers will not wait for slow pages to download. They want instant gratification and if they cannot get that from you and your site, they will just click on to the next site, giving your competitor the business.
Since you use computers to run your business, you may be totally up-to-date with the newest and latest modems and DSL lines. But most internet users are not. Surprisingly most users are still using slow dial-up accounts and just because you see your page download in 3 seconds, does not mean your potential clients are seeing it that fast.
Your goal is to get your site (all pages if possible) to download in the fastest and smoothest way.
Get rid of bulky graphics. Use words and links in place of graphics if possible.
Your logo and even your photo or a photo of your staff is good to have on the page, but they should not be so large that they slow the page down.
Compress all photos. Small gif and jpg files are the best. Bitmap and artwork files are larger so try not to use them.
Get rid of all superfluous images. If you accept credit cards, get rid of the photo of their icons and just list the cards. This will save space.
Get rid of that cute little “email us” logo that is twirling at the bottom of the page. It is most unprofessional and takes up too much room.
I know of one site that has a photo for each link on the navigation bar. What a waste. This page takes forever to load just so the cute images, which are nothing more than decoration, can load along with the links to their pages.
If you have a list of items for sale, there is no need to have a photo of each one on the home page or any other page for that matter.
Just use words and links to convey the message. Visitors may then click on the link and see one or two photos of the item they are interested in. Having photos of the item on the home page with many other photos only does more harm than good.
Use thumbnail photos when possible. If someone wants to see a larger photo, they can just click on the thumbnail. That saves a lot of space more than half sometimes. That is why thumbnail photos are such a common practice.
Get rid of images in the shared navigation bars. Shared navigation bars allow the same navigation areas (usually links to the rest of the site) to be shown the same on every page, but some pages will be slowed down greatly depending on what else is on the page.
We could go on and on.
Look at your site now. What is slowing down your pages? In most website creation tools there is a place where you can see how many seconds each page will take to download using different methods from DSL lines down to old 14.4 modems. Test each page and see how long it takes under each method. Use the 28.8 setting and try to get each page loading under 30 seconds with a 28.8 modem. See what happens.
Your goal is to get the pages to download fast. In turn, keeping your visitors happy. A happy visitor is a happy customer.
Tom Falco is editor of XpectMore.com Marketing eZine and also owns: http://www.TheDiscountPrinter.com To subscribe to XpectMore.com Marketing eZine mailto:ezine@xpectmore.com put “subscribe” in the subject line or visit: http://www.XpectMore.com