How is a website like a turtle? Hopefully, your website is defined by its strong shell and not by its extremely slow speed. If your clients notice that your website is really slow, this can make them less inclined to visit your site. How can increasing your website speed improve your customer service?
With a Speedy Website, New Leads Will Stick Around
All of the insurance marketing in the world won't work effectively if your leads can't land effectively on your website to get information or complete a transaction. According to Unbounce, "a 100-millisecond delay in load time can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%." While that might not seem like much, that 7% represents customers that you'd like to keep.
A slow website can also impact peoples' return rates as well. If you have a potential lead who is visiting your site for the first time and who is curious about your business, a slow website could be the factor that ultimately turns the person off your website and discourages them from coming back again.
Sometimes, specific website pages may take longer to load, causing people to bounce off of that particular page. Your website may also be slower on mobile than it is on desktop. When you check your site speed, look through your entire site on all platforms to get a true sense of its speed.
You work hard to create excellent, engaging content that drives conversions. You give more people a chance to engage with your content by improving your website speed. Here are some ways to do that.
Making Your Website Faster
If you want to give people the opportunity to interact with your website, enjoy your content, join your email list, and ultimately purchase your product, what can you do to make it easy for them?
Make your files smaller. Use software to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. Optimize your images so that they are smaller and in the correct format. According to Moz, "PNGs are generally better for graphics with fewer than 16 colors while JPEGs are generally better for photographs."
Use a content distribution network. This keeps copies of your site in different data centers around the world, so that it's easier for users to access your site quickly.
Cache your site so that the entire site doesn't need to load every time. A caching plugin or a tool like YSlow will help you set an expiry date for your website cache so that you maintain a balance between faster loading times and up-to-date data.
Clean up your coding. Work with your website designer to make sure that your website code is as clean as possible. Even doing simple things like removing extraneous commas from the site code will increase your website speed.
Watch your website theme. If you use a standard theme, make sure that it doesn't come with too many details. If your website theme has a lot of complex coding, then it can take longer to load. In many cases that complex coding may not actually add much to your user's website experience.
Get ready to improve your insurance marketing: talk with American Agents Alliance. We're here to assist you with many membership benefits that will change the way your insurance company does business. Connect with us today.
