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Nobody likes a slow website. They frustrate and annoy customers, leading to abandoned shopping carts, drops in traffic and ultimately lost revenue.
Fifty-three percent of mobile users want to see a website load within three seconds or they will navigate away from it. Sites that can load within five seconds see a 70% uptick in average session times on their pages. It’s clear that people want the websites they visit to load quickly and efficiently, which is bad news for slow websites. Even worse, in addition to potentially losing visitors, slow websites also take an SEO hit. Let’s take a look at how this happens and what you can do to avoid it. Google PenaltiesGoogle recently rolled out its Speed Update for mobile searches, which penalizes local websites that perform poorly for loading time for mobile searchers. So, now in addition to penalizing slow desktop sites, page speed is a factor in mobile searches, as well. To evaluate website speeds, Google uses these tools: Chrome User Experience Report Lighthouse Page Speed Insights A site that loads too slowly, and thus negatively affects user experience, will now see their rankings drop in Google. Page SpeedPage speed plays a big role in Google ranking. It is the time it takes for a given page on a website to completely load the page’s content. It is measured either by “page load time,” which is the amount of time for the page to fully load, or “time to first byte,” which is the amount of time it takes your web server to deliver the first byte of information to a visitor’s web browser. Some factors that can lead to slow page speed are:
Any one of these or a combination of a few or all of them will slow down a website. Return to SERPAlthough Google has denied using bounce rate to help determine ranking, one metric that it does likely use that is similar to Bounce Rate is a Return to SERP, which is when someone clicks on a link from a search engine results page (SERP) and then within a few seconds hits the back button to return to the SERP. If people do this consistently, it tells Google that the site doesn’t have the information people are looking for. If you have a slow-loading site, people might be clicking back to the SERP before they can actually see the information they’re looking for. This will -- correctly or incorrectly -- tell Google that your site, or at least that particular page, has nothing of interest for people and it will drop your site in the rankings. What You Can Do to Increase Page SpeedFirst and foremost, use the aforementioned Page Speeds Insights tool to check how well your website does for speed. If you see that it is running slowly, try the following:
Keep in mind that a slow website can happen to anyone. Even the mighty Amazon can slow down on Prime Day, which brings us to our final point. Too much traffic can be just as devastating for a site as too little traffic, maybe even moreso. An influx of visitors for any given reason can bog down a website and make it run slowly. That’s where Predikat can help. Our artificial intelligence monitors a site, learns the traffic patterns and then helps you make sure your site is always ready for traffic increases. Contact us today to see how we can help you be prepared for traffic spikes and avoid a slow website.
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Choosing the right website monitoring software will ensure your site is always running at peak performance, which is essential for staying competitive in the crowded online retail marketplace. With all the different monitoring tools out there, though, it can be tricky to choose the right one and get a good ROI for it. Keep these eight tips in mind to help you pick the right monitoring tool and get the full potential out of it once you’ve made your decision:
1. Define Your Objective Before you choose a website monitoring tool, it’s important to define your objective, which means knowing what your goals are for monitoring your site. Knowing what you want to accomplish will help when choosing the right monitoring tool. By defining your objective first, you can ensure the tool you choose is able to fulfill your stated requirements. Many businesses will choose a monitoring tool without establishing any kind of goal or objective and just hope it fulfills their purposes. Tool selection should be centred around its ability to fulfill your stated objective and process needs, not the other way around. 2. Recognize How Much Change Your IT Team Can Handle Any major change in a business is going to cause disruption to that business. And while change can definitely be a good thing, too much of it can also be detrimental to productivity. If you adopt or switch to a website monitoring tool that nobody on your IT team is familiar with and involves a steep learning curve, you might inadvertently cause them to get overwhelmed. Having too much to learn too quickly can lead to inertia and essentially cause your IT team to shut down. Assess the skillsets of your staff so you can see exactly how much new training they’ll require during the adoption of a new monitoring tool. If it’s too much, you may need to consider either switching to a different monitoring tool that will require less stringent training or hiring more staff who already have the required skills. 3. Lean Towards Monitoring Tools with Easy Integration Because technology evolves at a lightning pace, it is preferable to go with a monitoring tool that allows for data integration with other tools and one that exposes its API to accommodate loose coupling with other tools for the purposes of enterprise level monitoring. Choosing a tool that facilitates this type of collaboration allows for mixing and matching in the future, which is all but guaranteed to be required as technology continues to evolve. 4. Use Your Monitoring Tool to the Best of Its Abilities Whichever monitoring tool you go with, make a concerted effort to use it as effectively as possible. Dig deep and use all of its capabilities to their fullest potential. This means using it in conjunction with other platforms, as well as identifying opportunities for rationalizing it to make it as efficient as possible and consolidating it with other monitoring tools. 5. Align Your Monitoring with Other Reporting As crucial as monitoring is, it is only one facet of data collection and reporting within an enterprise’s landscape. Website monitoring should be aligned with security and business intelligence reporting initiatives to provide a better overall picture of a company’s health and readiness to face challenges. 6. Keep Integration in Mind When keeping track of network operations, website monitoring tools should integrate seamlessly with supporting operational tools like IT Service Management workflow, as well as notification management, incident management and service, communication and alerting tools. Having your monitoring tool integrate with your other systems will give you a more complete overall picture of your operation and let you make adjustments easily when and where necessary. 7. Know the Ancillaries Every monitoring tool is going to boast about its main selling features, so those are going to be easy to see. But, you should dig deeper beneath the surface to find out more about a given tool’s ancillary characteristics so you can incorporate those into your decision. If two or more monitoring tools have approximately the same main features, these secondary ones may be the deciding factor. Some things to look at are the levels of technical knowledge that will be required to use the tool, its pricing models, how much automation it is capable of, how easy it is to deploy, how it handles alerting and how scalable it is. 8. Remember the Main Points Analytics is so much more than unstructured text searches and scaled down alerting. The monitoring tool you use should be able to discover patterns in those analytics and make solid predictions about user behaviour in the future based on those patterns while continually learning about your enterprise along the way. It can be easy to get distracted by the various bells and whistles of the monitoring tools you will look at, but concentrate on the core offering because that’s what you’re after. Preparing to make your decision and then knowing exactly what to look for will make the decision process easier. For comprehensive, AI-based website monitoring that will keep your ecommerce website running at peak performance all the time, Predikat’s AIOps suite can help you do that, keeping your customers happy and your site profitable. Contact us today for a consultation to see how we can help you. |
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