Small Buisness Web Sites


Website Page Load Speed Matters

June 7th, 2015 ernie Posted in Customer Satisfaction No Comments »

Website Page Load Speed MattersWebsite page load speed matters to your customers. It also matters to the search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo as well as other lesser-known search engines. First, let’s discuss your customer experience. We will define your customer as anyone who comes to your site looking for information or to place orders. Customers are willing to wait a very short time before they click the back button. Or go to another site. reports indicate that a one-second delay can lead to an 11% drop in page views and lower customer satisfaction by 16%.

It all has to do with customer expectations. In today’s fast-paced world customers are typically looking for a page to load in 2 seconds or less. If a customer is dissatisfied then they are less likely to make a purchase on your site or contact you for more information. If this is not bad enough, then there is the SEO ranking. Your customers may not even be presented with your website in the first place by search engines if your site is viewed to be too slow.

Website Page Load Speed Matters – Search Engines

Search engines like Google use all sorts of indicators to rank a web page. One of them is the speed at which the page or pages load. If yours is not loading fast, then you probably are going to be ranked lower than many others. Your page will be well down on the list of search results. A potential customer will never be presented with your page because of this.

Of course, there are many other factors that could be a factor in the SEO results, however, this seems to be an important one.

This site struggles every day with ways to load our pages faster. It appears to be variable and dependent on many factors including how busy the server is, traffic on the internet, and even the user’s computer. Monitoring your results and ensuring that processes working on your site are kept to a minimum. This helps to ensure that the server can focus on delivering your page is always a good thing to consider.

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Improve Customer Satisfaction – WebSite Health

January 21st, 2015 ernie Posted in Customer Satisfaction No Comments »

Improve Customer SatisfactionOur last post discussed web site speed i.e. the time it takes to load a page once the reader clicks on a link to your site. There are added aspects to consider. For example, if your site uses a contact form.  Some templates come with a built-in contact form. While others will need a plugin to add this feature. Test the contact form for speed of response, for ease of use, and results in terms of customers and readers filling in the form. Remember to respond to them immediately.

Even if it is an automated response it is better than nothing at all. You will need to follow up within 24 hours with a real response. Otherwise, you risk getting bad comments on various boards, etc. This includes those people who post comments on various topics. Respond to them, even the negative ones. Other readers will gauge your response and decide if they wish to contact you after reading how you handle even the negative responses.

Improve Customer Satisfaction – Digital Books

If it applies a digital book might be the answer to retain loyal customers and keep them coming back. For example, we have not done this yet on our site, we are just getting started, but stay tuned we will have one sometime in the future. We also blog consistently talking about various topics that are of interest to our readers and to small business owners who are looking for information about building, maintaining, and operating a web site.

Improve Customer Satisfaction – Test after Every change

Operating a blog or a web site involves changing content, upgrading plugins, and themes all of the time. As these elements change, they sometimes stop working the way they should and the only way to find this out is to always test after making a change to confirm that everything is still working the way it should. Set up a regular testing methodology to ensure that the content is being delivered the way you wish and the plugins are doing what they are supposed to. Fix any negative test results immediately to minimize the impact on your customers.

Check the Time it Takes Web Pages to Load

We thought it is important to emphasize web page load speed one more time. There are many locations along the path between the server where your website is hosted and the user or person loading your page. There are a multitude of hops that have routers processing yours and millions of other bits of data. If one of those routers is overloaded or running a bit slow, your page will not load quickly. Same thing if your server is overloaded.

The first thing to do is to run a test called Tracert. Basically it will check the response time for all hops between your website and your location. If there are locations including your server that are responding slowly, it will be shown. You can then decide if any action should be taken and where to focus your efforts!

For more topics on customer satisfaction, click here.

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Web Site Health – Customer Satisfaction

January 7th, 2015 ernie Posted in Customer Satisfaction No Comments »

Web Site HealthYou have improved the content of your companies web site or blog, it is fresh and accurate. There are lots of products covered and you have added all of the information that your clients and customers may need to help them decide on using your firm or contacting your firm for more information. But calls and contacts are simply not coming through and you are beginning to wonder if the investment in this web site was worth it. Maybe you should review your Web Site Health first.

There are many different attributes that will determine if customers will come to your site and then stay there to browse your material. By having excellent original content you have satisfied the search engines, but have you done enough? Once your potential readers or customers have been presented with search results that include your web site, the next step is for them to click on the link and be presented with the results.

Web Site Health – Response time

Many web sites are slow to respond for a variety of reasons. In some cases it is the server that it is running on that is slow. In others it can be a network issue. It might even be the readers last mile or modem at their location. Regardless, if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load a page, many people are just going to move onto another site and you have lost them forever!

The server and the configuration of your web site is within your control, while the other elements are not. Take the necessary steps to make sure that you are paying for a high response time server. Then design your web site to be as fast as possible. Delete any plugins that are not being used. Compress images before uploading to your blog. Delete anything that is not being used so that your blog can run as fast as absolutely possible.

Select a WordPress Template that is Efficient

There are all types of templates available. Some are more complex than others and some will load faster than others. Keep it as simple as possible. Test a lot until you have a template that delivers the content in an efficient manner that is satisfying visually to the customer. Keep testing to ensure that the theme and template work well with your server. Remember the 3 second rule and if your site is not loading within this time frame you could be losing customers.

For information on customer satisfaction information, click here.

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Web Content Development