At that point, my figures were showing that lots of people (relatively speaking for a site that was less than a month old) were visiting my site. Most of them of them stayed for less than a minute and cleared off without looking at any other pages. So, people visited but few felt compelled to hang about and check out what other good deals were available on the site.
I looked through my Google Analytics details and saw that the time it took to load pages on my website for visitors was up to 12 seconds for some pages. It was not surprising that people were not staying long. I hate websites that take ages to load in your browser.
I had also stopped using my personal social media accounts to promote links back to offers and used just the new, website specific social media accounts to publicise the site, as well as the SEO plug-ins that I use with WordPress, namely the 'Google XML Sitemaps' and the 'SEO Ultimate' plug-ins which update the main search engines of changes to the site (very useful!).
The effect has been marked. My website loads in a flash compared to a couple of weeks ago. My visitors numbers have not gone up, although they are steadily growing. However, the impact on the change to the load time is clear. Visitors are now visiting nearly four times as many pages on the site. The 'Bounce Rate' (How many people visit no more than the first page they land upon before leaving) has gone down from 85% to about 10%. The time visitors spend on the site has gone up from about 20 seconds per visit to between 2.5 minutes and 6.5 minutes. In this time, I made my highest commission to date too.
It seems clear that 'supercharging' the load time of the website has had a major impact. Google is still the largest source of visitors by a factor of nine. So, the social media links are important, but, they are not as important to the experience the visitors have when they arrive at a site which loads quickly. People are impatient and quite right too.
I just can't imagine being able to do this without Google Analytics or some other measurement package.
Interesting that the bounce rate has dropped that much! Although I agree that load time can be a significant factor in having a high bounce rate, I generally only see a major bounce rate decrease by making physical content changes to each page. This includes layout and CTA changes.
ReplyDeleteW3TC is my caching plugin of choice, I have been using it for a couple of years now after changing from WP super cache. I have also had significant page speed increases using Google's JS directory (basically as a JS cdn), I think there is a WP plugin these days. Also moving all JS to the footer, and using Yahoo's smush it service, it's amazing what that will do for page speed, even on images that Photoshop have optimised!
Great work, and thanks for posting this information, helpful to everyone looking to improve their site speed :)
Hi Justin, Thannks for your comment. I will try out that plugin. I've not uded Google's JS Directory and will look that up too.
ReplyDeleteI'm enjoying learning. Thanks for the encouragement!
Will