3 Tips from an Inbound Web Designer
Website performance and website growth are two seperate things that are closely knit, which have a big influence over each other. A slow website will greatly impact user experience, your page rank and can also have a negative impact on your overall brand.
Generating traffic to your website is not the end goal however. Once you have a steady flow of traffic coming to your website, you need to focus on your conversion points. This is where it’s important to have a strategy for your growth and for getting qualified traffic to your website which will make optimizing for conversions a much easier task.
1. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize. (getting more traffic)
Remove Unused Javascript
It is crucial you optimize everything. If your website is using plugins, has a bunch of analytic scripts or is even using ad network scripts that aren’t actually being looked at or aren’t necessary, remove them! Javascript is extremely powerful but it can also be the culprit of a slow website and it can be misused in a way to create poor experiences (hence the reason ad blockers have become so popular these days).
Resize and Optimize Images
Images are most often the culprit to a slow loading web page, as they are almost always the biggest file on the page that is rendering. You should always be sure you’re using the correct image size and image format while you are creating / editing a page. In general, you really only need PNGs or JPGs for most things on your site. Here are a couple helpful suggestions for which file format to choose:
- Use JPG’s for actual photos of people, places, and things.
- Use PNG’s for images with text in them and for illustrations (such as icons, banner ads, etc.). Alternatively, you could also use SVGs for illustrations if you are not worried about older browsers.
If you have to have transparency in your image, you’ll want to use a PNG. Transparent PNG’s have a tendency of getting pretty large. However, you can save a drastic amount of space if you use an 8-bit Alpha PNG without losing image quality. If you are using Adobe, they have the feature built into Photoshop CC 2015 export options. Alternatively, you can convert your 32bit PNGs into 8bit PNGs using a service such as tinypng.
2. Design a Compelling CTA (getting more leads)
The first step for a successful call-to-action is a great offer. If the offer itself is sucky, it’s going to be pretty hard to get any clicks. Once you have a compelling offer, then you just need to make sure you’re communicating that offer in your banner ad as best as possible. Here are some general tips to keep in mind when designing a CTA:
- Use the brightest color in your brand’s color pallette for the actual button as this is what will draw the eye the most
- Don’t be too wordy, especially if the offer speaks for itself or is self-explanatory
- Use white-space effectively
3. A/B Test Everything (getting more leads & customers)
If you have a lot of traffic but are lacking in leads, you should run various A/B tests on each bottleneck you find in the funnel. If your CTAs are getting a lot of views but are lacking clicks, create an A/B test with new messaging or possibly a new button style. If your landing page is getting a lot of traffic but is getting less than a 1% conversion rate, you should try changing something on the page and come back to it after it’s had another 1000 visits. There is not a single correct way to do everything. It really just depends on what works for your specific persona. This is where GDD works extremely well.
PROTIP: when a/b testing change one thing at a time so you can pinpoint what actually made the difference for future reference.
Those are my tips for today. If you have more ideas or tools you use I’d love to hear about them in the comments below. Now, it’s time for me to get back to work!
Originally posted on Bluleadz.com