Vodafone increased sales by 8% just by reducing their website loading time. (1)
In a physical store, part of customer experience is determined by how easily and fast your customers can find what they are looking for. The better experience they have the more likely they will buy from you. Customer satisfaction directly impacts your revenue. Your business website is no different. Whether you are selling products or services, your website is often the first point of contact with potential customers. What you may not realise is that your website performance can directly impact your bottom line.
If you want to know how well your website is performing you can head to PageSpeed Insights and type your business URL. You will get one report for mobile and one for desktop. You should have a score above 90 in all categories for both reports. After all roughly 60% of users access the internet through their mobile devices (2).
Google has defined four main aspects that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.
Performance: The speedometer of your website
Performance measures how long it takes for your customers to enter and explore your digital shop. Web Vitals (3), a subset of performance metrics, focuses on how fast your pages load, how quickly visitors can interact with them, and whether the content remains stable. Your website is the first interaction potential customers have with your business.
If your website meets the right performance metrics and thresholds users are 24% less likely to abandon your website before any content is available (4). Studies show that a one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.Fast-loading and stable pages mean more potential customers stay.
Accessibility: Welcoming everyone in
Accessibility ensures that your digital shop is welcoming to everyone, regardless of their abilities. Just like having a ramp for customers with mobility challenges in a physical store, an accessible website accommodates various users. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 27% of the global population are visually impaired (5) and the American Foundation for the Blind found that 43% of students with vision loss use the internet (6), a number that is hopefully increasing with the proper use of technology. Optimising your website for screen readers and screen magnification makes it possible for them to have access to the internet and your business.
Another type of disability, although a minor one, is colour blindness. It affects over 300 million people worldwide. Approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are colour blind (7). Checking for contrast and using the right colour palette makes it a lot easier for colour blind people to navigate through your website and get to know your products and services.
Ensuring that people with visual impairments can access and understand the content in your website you expand the reach of your business, promote inclusion, and serve a larger and more diverse audience.
Best practices: The gold standard
Best practices are like the golden rules of maintaining a well-organised and secured digital shop. It follows three major categories
- It ensures that each website follows browsers’ recommendations for it to function properly in different browsers like Google Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari. Although currently Chrome is the most popular browser it only accounts for 65.31% (8), leaving a huge amount of potential customers using other browsers, like safari and edge, you should be supporting as well.
- Provides different user experience recommendations. For example making it easy for visitors to use forms and not have multiple requests on load like notifications and geolocation.
- Security. Unlike a physical store, your website never closes and doesn’t have someone looking after it all the time. Making sure your business online profile follows security best practices makes it harder for any attacker to tamper with your business. It is estimated that WordPress sites receive around 90,000 attacks per minute resulting in 52% of vulnerabilities caused by out of date plugins (9).
Overall, following best practices ensure that your website operates smoothly, providing a trustworthy and reliable experience for your customers. Implementing these practices safeguards your online presence and builds trust.
SEO: Being seen in the digital world
Google’s success lies in its ability to provide users with the information they need. It does by using crawlers, also called “robot” or “spider”, that automatically discover and scan websites by following links from one web page to another. It then uses information extracted from each website to index them, similar to an index in a library, which ultimately allows Google to show users what it asses as the best information for their query (10). SEO will help Google see you as an authority in your field and you will be more noticeable to an audience you wouldn’t have reached otherwise.
Conclusion
Understanding the importance of Web Vitals and the information provided by tools like PageSpeed Insights will help you ensure your business online front provides the user experience your customers deserve. Your consistency and care are an investment in the future that will ultimately attract more customers and increase your revenue.