Website performance problems bedevil you. You realized this after it became obvious to you that people visiting your site never really do what you hoped.
Few ventured from page to page, meaning few discovered all that you offered.
Few read your content and absorbed your ideas or embraced your suggestions.
Few clicked the links and buttons you set out for them. Few completed and submitted your forms. Few asked to chat with your team.
Now you wonder how this happened, how you came to suffer website performance problems.
Website Performance Problems are Bad
Consider yourself fortunate to wonder such a thing. Often, website performance problems go unrecognized.
“A lot of times you don’t know there’s a problem until something major happens,” says Mason James, co-founder of Valet and its head of business development. “That becomes the tipping point. It’s then that people realize they need to start digging into it to find out what’s wrong.”
Valet performs website health assessments that get to the root of the problem. If you own or manage a poor-performing website, Valet’s diagnostics give you the big picture.
“Many clients come to us because there is a specific problem,” Mason adds. “For example, the trigger event might be that one of your execs loaded your site on her iPhone and had a terrible experience. Or you received a message from Google telling you that you lack a fully encrypted, secure connection.
“But sometimes you just have a feeling. The site feels like it’s running slow. It doesn’t appear to be loading as quickly as normal.”
Mason says there is a temptation to do nothing when the symptoms of a poor-performing website appear.
“In some cases, the urge to ignore the problem springs from a misguided hope that the situation will resolve itself given enough time,” he explains. “In other cases, people do nothing because they’re in denial. They delude themselves into thinking nothing is wrong, so why worry.”
Reasons for Website Performance Problems
Here are some of the most common reasons why you might have a poor-performing website.
Crawl errors. These make it difficult for Google and other search engines to properly index your website and its pages. As a result, your site turns up far from the top of the search rankings. Since people can’t find your site through Google, they don’t visit.
Mobile unfriendliness. Website performance problems arise from owning an online property that displays better on a desktop than on a phone. The big problem created by this: people bounce when they encounter difficulty utilizing a site reached via a mobile device. And when they bounce, you lose the opportunity to engage and convert them.
Messy navigation. The more links and menus you put on each page, the worse things get. A page bursting with page options looks daunting. Because it is. Too many choices paralyze the mind and can make visitors run for the nearest exit—assuming they can find it among all the clutter. And if paralysis doesn’t set in, confusion surely will. In any event, navigation overkill equals website performance problems.
Two Fundamental Sources of Problems
These two problems deserve most of the blame for your website performance problems.
Skirting of best practices. Best practices are proven ways of doing things for the attainment of superior results. For example, it’s considered a best practice to make your website accessible by visitors with disabilities. Another: search box in the header and signup box in the footer.
Mistakes in coding. This is a major source of website performance problems. Reason: coding touches every aspect of your website. It takes surprisingly little in the way of faulty coding to wreck things. A syntax error here and a transposition there. And before you know it, you’ve got security holes, slow loading speeds, instability, and a more.
So what can you do if you have website performance problems? Contact Valet and ask for a website health assessment. If you’ve been following our series of earlier posts, you already know that Valet is your go-to source for not just a site health diagnosis but also the remedies to make your site better.
Drop us a line here. Tell us you’re concerned that website performance problems may be hurting your business strategic ambitions.