Almost every person can remember a time when they didn’t complete a purchase. Maybe you had to deal with a store that was too busy or a rude employee who made you want to leave right away. You also might remember backing out of a purchase you were going to make online.
There are many factors that can affect whether or not a company’s website helps or hurts its sales figures.
By checking out the information below, you’ll learn:
The issues that can cause a slow website
Why having a slow website can cause a lot of problems
Tips to help you speed up your website’s ordering process
Potential mistakes with your ordering process to avoid at all costs
What Causes a Slow Website?
There are many factors that can cause a website to load slowly and perform poorly. By learning about the reasons behind a slow website, you can make sure that your company’s website isn’t experiencing the same problems. Here’s a closer look at the top factors that cause slow websites.
1. Placing Large Images on Your Website
If you’re like most people, images help you visualize what a story is about. When you’re making content on the internet, it’s always good to have images that go along with your written words. However, you don’t want to have extremely large images or those that take up a lot of space.
These images will take longer for a visitor’s internet connection to load. This situation leads to this person waiting for your website to load. Most likely, they’ll get frustrated at waiting and will leave your website. When this happens, it’s difficult to achieve sustainable business growth.
Fortunately, you can avoid this situation by scaling down your images. This might seem complicated, but there are many free programs and services that can take care of image scaling automatically.
You can also avoid massive images slowing down your website by only uploading certain image formats. For instance, many people enjoy using JPEG images because they’re small in size. By using these types of images, you can still have high-quality pictures without slowing down your website.
2. Lots of Flash Content
To provide images, text, layouts, and everything you see on a website, there’s a lot of code working behind the scenes to make this happen. With that said, there are many types of code that can create amazing websites. In the past, many people and companies preferred to use Flash to accomplish this goal.
More often than not, having a website that uses a lot of Flash files to operate will run slowly. Fortunately, you can start fixing this problem by reducing how many of these files your website continues using. If possible, you can also choose to remove all Flash from your website.
It’s important to note that making any kinds of website changes without knowledge of what you’re doing can lead to disastrous results. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s best to have someone that does help with this project. You might also consider hiring outside help from a freelancer or similar type of project-based worker.
One of the best ways to reduce your website’s dependency on Flash files is by using HTML5 instead. This language uses much fewer resources than Flash, giving your website its same intuitiveness without running slowly. Plus, Flash recently reached its end-of-life phase at the end of 2020. This means that Adobe will no longer support Flash, which doesn’t make it very useful for website owners.
3. Using Lots of Pop-Up or Display Ads
It’s understandable to want to monetize your website besides the money that comes from your company’s sales. With that in mind, one way to achieve this goal is by setting up display advertisements. While one or two well-placed ads are great ways to generate more revenue, you don’t want to go overboard with advertisements.
Not only will a lot of pop-up or display advertisements turn visitors away, but they also contribute to a website’s loading speed. If your website has a lot of display advertisements, it’s going to run slowly.
4. Partnering With a Bad Hosting Platform
To have a website that works properly, you’ll need to choose some type of website hosting. There are many hosting providers on the internet. While you’ll have lots of options, it’s best to stay from unreliable hosting companies.
This situation can be understandably frustrating, especially when you create a website and do everything right. If you’ve been cleaning up your code and following all of the tips you’ve read in this article, but your website is still slow, your hosting provider could be the problem.
It’s a good idea to consider reaching out to your hosting provider. Let them know the problems that are happening. Hopefully, they’re able to find a solution that improves the speed of your website. If this doesn’t happen, backup your website and find a new hosting provider. Without a reliable hosting provider, it’s going to be difficult to resell your company’s electronics.
5. Not Utilizing a CDN Service
Another great way to improve the speed of your website is to use what’s called a Content Distribution Network (CDN). This type of network is made up of distributed servers, serving a website’s content to visitors as fast as possible.
When someone visits a website that utilizes a CDN, it loads data from servers that are as close as possible to a website visitor. Because of this, CDNs typically load website data faster than websites without this type of server network.
There is a wide range of CDNs available for websites. If your company’s budget is fairly tight and your website isn’t too large, you could likely find what you need by working with Cloudflare. This company has a free CDN solution in place for smaller companies. Other popular CDN providers are StackPath, KeyCDN, CacheFly, and Amazon CloudFront.
6. Forgetting to Clean Up Your Code
As mentioned earlier, websites are made up of various types of code. Almost any action you take while creating or updating your website will create code. Over time, lots of created code fills up your website’s stylesheet. If your website has a long stylesheet that’s full of data, it’s going to likely reduce your website’s speed.
If you feel confident in editing your code, you’ll want to go through your website and solve this problem right away. While a little bit of data might not seem like an issue, it could be negatively affecting your website’s load times. It’s also important to note that most major search engines like Google don’t typically want to rank websites well that have unclean code.
It’s also understandable if you would prefer to not risk damaging your company’s website by cleaning up its code. Fortunately, there are many professionals on the internet who can safely and quickly remove any unclean code from your company’s website.
Why Are Slow Websites Bad?
There’s no doubt that we’re living in an age when people expect instant results. You can visit a drive-thru and get food quickly. It’s also possible to order almost anything from Amazon and receive it in two days if you’re a Prime member.
This also happens within the electronics industry. If someone, for example, is visiting a website that sells flipped phones, these customers will expect to buy and receive their items quickly. As you can expect, having a website that loads slowly won’t appeal to most people. Here’s a closer look at the major reasons why you should avoid having a slow website.
Losing Traffic
One of the main disadvantages of having a slow website is that it’s going to cost you traffic. One study found that 47% of website visitors expect a website to load in under two seconds. With such a short amount of time to gain a visitor’s attention, your website needs to load as quickly as possible.
So, what happens if a visitor comes to your website and it takes much longer than two seconds to fully load? Most likely, this visitor will back out of your website in favor of another one. Or, they’ll go back to their search results and find another website to visit.
Making matters worse, a slow website doesn’t often create a good first impression for your visitors. This is why another study found that almost 80% of website visitors who visited a slow website won’t visit it again in the future.
Seeing Search Engine Traffic Drops
If you avoid fixing any speed-related issues on your website, it can also begin affecting your company’s search engine rankings. As time goes on, search engines like Google will begin to notice that your website isn’t loading quickly. In fact, Google has a PageSpeed tool built with this purpose in mind, which is to ensure websites load fast.
When search engine bots are seeing slow websites, most of them will begin to lower the rankings of these websites. This is understandable from the end of these companies. Search engines make money when lots of people use them. To keep making sure this happens, search engines (in theory) want to display websites that contain relevant information and perform optimally.
Search engines will avoid placing slower websites prominently because this situation won’t create happy internet users. If a search engine user wants to find iPhones in bulk, the websites Google would display need to have this content and deliver it quickly.
An Increase in Bounce Rate
Another important website-related metric is called a bounce rate. Bouncing occurs when someone visits your company’s website and doesn’t take action. Search engines typically base how “good” a website is on how long visitors stay there and what actions they take.
To help make this point clearer, imagine that you’re recording data about website visits. So, you have someone visit two separate websites. After this happens, you see that this person visited website A for a total of 6 minutes and 37 seconds. In this same example, the person visited website B and stayed on it for only six seconds.
Chances are, it’s safe to assume that website A is the one that a visitor enjoyed more because they stayed on it longer. When you start seeing your bounce rates skyrocket, a slow website might be what’s to blame.
8 Tips to Help You Speed Up Your Company’s Ordering Process
Understandably, you want your ordering process to be as fast as possible. However, this might not currently be the case. If you want to make your website perform faster, we have a bunch of helpful tips for you. Check out the tips below to make your ordering process as simple and effective as possible.
1. Set Up a Test Purchase With Someone You Know
One of the best ways to learn if your website’s ordering process needs improving is by having someone else complete a test purchase on it. Essentially, you want this person to be someone who isn’t familiar with your company and its website. By doing this, you’re having someone visit and use your website who doesn’t have any prior connections to it.
Setting this up is a great way to get an outsider’s opinion of what is good and what you could do to improve your website. It’s also important to ensure that the person doing this isn’t someone who’s going to spare your feelings. Instead, as a normal visitor would do, let them go through the process of finding and buying electronics on your website.
By getting an honest opinion of your website’s ordering process, you’ll gain a clear understanding of what to fix.
2. Keep Things Organized With Menus
You can also speed up your company’s website by using menus and category pages. Chances are, your website is already utilizing some of these pages. For an example of how to set categories and menus up, look no further than Amazon. There’s no denying that Amazon is one of the most popular websites in the world.
One reason why Amazon continues racking up a ton of sales is that this company knows how to make shopping easy and intuitive for its customers. When you visit websites like Amazon, you’ll notice that this company’s entire inventory is organized into categories.
If you wanted to visit Amazon to buy a new pair of shoes, you could easily use this website’s category layout to find what you’re looking for.
As an example, let’s say that your electronics website sold new smartphones and tablets. If this was the case, you would want to have pages dedicated to tablets and smartphones. You could take things one step further and include category pages for brands, such as Apple and Samsung.
3. Test and Test Again
If you want a surefire way to improve your website’s overall performance, you’ll want to start split testing. Otherwise known as A/B testing, split testing is a great way to find out what your website visitors want.
It might seem hard to do, but there is a wide range of programs and services that can help you set up and test multiple versions of your website. A few popular split testing tools are Optimizely, Freshmarketer, and Convert.
The key benefit of split testing is that you’ll have data about actions people take when they’re using each one of your testing pages. With enough data, you can soon ensure that all of your website’s pages are converting at their highest rates.
4. Listen to What Your Customers Are Saying
Another great tip is to use the opinions of your customers to create a faster, better website. If you have any social media pages set up or comment areas on your website, look for past messages from customers about your website.
If there’s a big enough problem or your website has been in existence for a while, you should see a few suggestions from your customers that could be a major source of help for your business.
But what should you do if you don’t know what your company’s customers want? Start asking them. You could start using surveys to have customers tell you what needs to be improved on your website. If you really want to learn what people have to say, entice them with a coupon towards their next purchase or something similar.
For example, you could ask your website visitors about what phone brands they want your company to start carrying. This strategy is great for phone flippers wanting to find items that will sell out quickly.
With a good incentive, you can start gaining a ton of valuable insights that you can use to make your company’s website fast and the checkout options simple.
5. Time Your Ordering Process
If you’re looking for another way to improve things, consider getting a stopwatch ready and timing how long it takes to complete an order on your website. While this method is simple, it can also be an effective one to let you know about any aspects of your website that are too time-consuming.
Start your stopwatch after your website begins loading. Then, complete a test order and note how long this process takes to complete. You might also try the same method at one of your competitor’s websites, stopping before you actually buy an item from them.
6. See What the Competition is Doing
You might find that you’re unsure what needs to happen to create a better shopping experience for your customers. If this is happening, it’s time to take a look at what the competition is doing. With that in mind, take a quick look at some of your competitors. By doing this, you can potentially learn about innovations or features that your company’s website can start using.
Of course, you don’t want to blatantly steal another company’s idea. However, you can get inspiration by checking out your competitors. Sometimes, this inspiration could be the thing that unlocks your company’s potential to start making a lot of sales.
7. Create Customer Personas
Take a moment to imagine that you work in the automobile industry. Let’s imagine that a customer arrives that has only driven pickup trucks their entire lives. The only vehicle this person wants is a pickup truck. Unfortunately, you don’t know this information and assume this person is only interested in SUVs.
If your company isn’t creating and utilizing buyer personas, you might find yourself in the same situation. When you create buyer personas, you’re taking time to learn in-depth information about your company’s target audience. This information helps you learn about their interests, behaviors, jobs, and other important data.
You might think that learning this type of information about your company’s potential or current customers is a little invasive. But, as long as you’re doing things ethically, there won’t be any problems. This same strategy is one that many companies use to find out what their customers are interested in.
When you create buyer or customer personas, you’re optimizing your company’s website to be more appealing to these individuals.
8. Consider Having an Exit Pop-Up
We’re not fans of having excessive pop-up advertisements on your website. However, with the right advertisement, an exit pop-up ad can be a powerful selling tool. These pop-ups won’t be 100% effective, as no marketing tactic is. However, experts state that having an exit pop-up in place should help boost conversions by about 5 to 10%.
If you’re unsure what an exit pop-up is, let us give you a quick explanation. Exit pop-ups activate when a website visitor is attempting to stop browsing a website. Considering that, these pop-ups trigger when someone either moves to a new browser tab or window. What you choose to place in this ad is up to you. However, a good suggestion would be an incentive like a small discount or a similar type of offer.
Avoid These Mistakes With Your Company’s Website
In this last section, we want to mention some of the most common mistakes that e-commerce website owners unintentionally make. Fortunately, all of these mistakes are fixable. Here’s more information about website-related mistakes you’ll want to fix as soon as possible.
Forcing Someone to Make an Account
Hopefully, every visitor who is interested in your electronics company buys something from your website. Unfortunately, that won’t always be the case. This is why it’s usually not the best decision to force every website visitor into making an account on your website.
Understandably, it would be ideal if every website visitor wanted to sign up with your website. But, the truth is that some people just want to look around. This doesn’t mean that people uninterested in making an account now will always feel this way.
However, it’s best to have the option for someone to create an account on your website instead of making them do this to see what you have to offer. In this day and age, some people prefer not to give out any personal information until they’re ready to make a purchase.
Having Walls of Text
It’s important to list information about all of your company’s electronics. By doing this, you’re letting website visitors know about everything your company offers. With that said, make sure that you’re placing pictures in between a lot of text.
Think about websites that you visit. Chances are unless you’re in the reading mood, your attention isn’t going to stay focused on a website that has nothing but long “walls” of text.
If you’re creating product pages, take and upload images of the electronics you’re wanting to sell. Not only does this add images to your website, but it also shows visitors what electronics your company carries.
Not Utilizing the Power of Social Proof
Something else that is a powerful selling tool is social proof. Social proof is showing a potential customer that other people like them have done business with your company. It’s human nature to want to know that a company you’re interested in has a history of satisfied customers.
Since you’re trying to make sales from your company’s website, this won’t be like a traditional retail experience. You won’t have a parking lot that other people can drive by and see is full. With social proof, you’re showing online customers that your business is popular with other people.
Plus, you’re taking advantage of the power of personal recommendations by utilizing social proof. Research shows that 76% of those surveyed admit they’re not likely to buy a product or service from a business that doesn’t have any reviews.
If your business doesn’t have any reviews yet, try one (or all) of these strategies:
Send emails asking for reviews.
Include notes asking for reviews with your company’s shipped products.
Ask for a review on your company’s thank you page after someone makes a purchase.
Spreading Information Over Multiple Pages
When someone visits your company’s website, you want to present information as concisely as possible. Unfortunately, some companies will make the mistake of spreading out information across multiple pages.
This isn’t a great strategy because you’re intentionally sending visitors on a wild goose chase. Unless someone is extremely interested in your company or its products, most people won’t be willing to click through a lot of pages to get what they want.
Not Setting Up A Guest Checkout Page
As your customer gets closer to your website’s checkout page, they’re almost near the end of their purchasing journey. However, one misstep could cause these people who are almost customers to change their minds. For some companies, this misstep is often not having a guest checkout system in place.
People back out of buying something more often than you might think. Research from Baymard found that the average online shopping cart gets abandoned about 70% of the time. One way that you can prevent some people from leaving their carts is with a guest checkout option.
A guest checkout option makes it as fast and easy as possible for someone to buy a product or service. With this option, someone only needs to input the bare minimum of information to complete a transaction. Therefore, guest checkouts are great for both people who are short on time or those who don’t feel comfortable giving out a lot of personal information.
Leaving a Customer’s Questions Unanswered
Have you ever had questions about an item before making an online purchase? If you’re like many people, you have. Hopefully, someone from this company was there to answer your questions. If they did, it’s likely that you made your purchase after someone answered your question and helped you out.
Your company’s website visitors are likely to have questions, too. When they do, it’s important to make sure that either a person or a chatbot is there to help. At the bare minimum, make sure to have your company’s contact information easily available.
Not Investing in a Security Solution
By this point, you’ve learned a lot of information about website speed and how it affects your company. With that in mind, another way to safeguard your website to continue making sales is by focusing on its security. Having a secure website helps ensure your business remains protected from scammers, hackers, and all sorts of other cybersecurity threats.
There are a few ways to go about securing your website. You can choose to start using a cybersecurity program. It’s also possible to find many cybersecurity services that offer their own website protection. While either option will create new expenses for your company, having a secure website is a must in this day and age.
Considering that you’re going to be working with other people’s personal and financial information, it’s essential for your website to have a security solution in place.
In closing, the speed of your company’s ordering process can have a major impact on how many sales it makes. With a fast website and an easy ordering process, you make it easy for interested people and companies to become life-long customers of your business. If you would like more tips aimed to help you out in the electronics industry, don’t forget to visit Trade-In Tech’s blog.