Why making your website as light as possible will bolster your bottom line

The topic of revenue should be a part of the everyday running of your website. A lot of times, especially in medium-sized organisations, you’ve got a lot of people involved with what happens on the website. There can be arguments going on about what goes on the front page, what belongs on the footers, what’s on the menu, and so on. If you’re a retailer, the first thing you’ve got to remember is that you need to strip back your site to make it as light as possible.

This means taking care of normal code bloat. A lot of themes built out from Magento and other CMS include an awful lot of stuff that you don’t even need and that you’ll never use. But if it’s there, your developer’s likely pushed it onto your site. I think of it like a hot air balloon: you need to jettison all the unwanted weight before you can get off the ground.

If someone can’t interact with your website for 30 seconds, that’s going to be a big issue. That needs to be fixed before you do anything else. One of my clients wanted to add a survey to their checkout page to find out why customers weren’t staying. Well, if that page is taking 30 seconds to load, their customers were likely leaving before they even found the survey. Fix that first, then add a survey if you’ve still got problems.

Strip things back. In our business, the first thing we ask is how something will affect revenue. If the answer isn’t positive, you’ve got to ask why you’re wasting valuable time implementing it. Your time is almost always better spent fixing your site to improve your user experience.

This article originally published on stewartmedia.com.au.

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