Your website is costing you thousands – here’s how to stop it
Inspiration
Key learnings...
- Potential customers have little patience for slow websites and those that don’t look after their experience.
- Increasing consumer awareness around sustainability means it’s important to keep your website operating as cleanly as possible.
- Reducing download sizes, turning off autoplay videos, using a green web hosting solution and synthetic monitoring can improve website performance.
- Regularly check on your IT infrastructure and third-party activities to prevent magecart attacks, which result in data breaches.
When the cost of living is soaring and consumer spend subsequently becomes more considered as they watch the purse-strings, now is a great time to review your company’s infrastructure to ensure you’re making every investment count. While you might first explore your technology, applications, hardware, and software, have you thought about making changes to your website? Here, Gav Winter, CEO of next-generation website testing company RapidSpike shares his advice on how you can maximise your online presence without eroding the company budget.
Whether you’re starting up your business or are well-established, your website is an important part of the overall customer experience. And today, it’s considered the norm for organisations to have an online presence as well as – or instead of – a physical premise.
Consumer loyalty is relatively simple when it comes to providing a virtual offering. A healthy, reliable, and secure website – with a laser-beam focus on every user’s journey – should keep them coming back for more. Fail to achieve this and negative word-of-mouth spreads fast. Plus, you’ll most likely see shoppers head to one of your competitors as a result.
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be a costly and time-consuming exercise to keep your website performing at a high level, nor do you need to have a computer science degree to resolve any issues.
It’s about investing in the tools and practices you need to help you regularly review your online offering so you can continuously improve the user experience.
Start with website speed and reliability
It’s estimated that consumers can form an opinion about an ecommerce brand as quickly as 0.05 seconds after a webpage loads. So, it's no surprise that conversions drop by 7% for every one second delay.
Having a reliable website means your business can offer high speed, better uptime, and maximum security, to name a few advantages.
If your business has seasonal uplifts and quieter periods, now’s a good time to take precautionary measures to mitigate outages.
For example, if you’re a travel brand you can prepare for next summer’s bookings by testing your website early, so you address what an increase in traffic might mean well in advance, leaving enough time to sort any problems before it’s too late.
Check your page load speeds and see how you can improve them, and ask whether you need to scale up your infrastructure to accommodate fluctuating periods of online activity?
Additionally, throughout these checks you should be able to spot any failing pages and ensure they’re dealt with at the earliest opportunity, so you keep visitors happy, avoid downtime – by quickly debugging any issues – and manage your brand’s reputation in the process.
Think about sustainable alternatives
Did you know that the average website costs our planet six grams of CO2 per page view? That’s the equivalent of driving a car 12,000 miles.
With several brands committing to a greener future, monitoring the cleanliness of your website should also be one for your priority list.
Click each heading to read about some simple ways to offer a more eco-conscious online presence:
1
Reduce page sizes and processing times
Uploading an image that’s 1MB too big might not seem a big deal on the surface, but when it’s downloaded 1 million times, that’s a huge amount of server, network, and user device time – not to mention electricity and transport time.
Optimise your images to decrease the size and improve the speed of your page loads to cause less energy consumption.
2
Tap into ‘quick wins’
You don’t have to scrap your website and start again if you think it’s not hitting your sustainability criteria. Often, little changes can make a big difference.
Switch off auto-playing videos, have less/optimised JavaScript, reduce customer fonts, look into a green web hosting solution instead of your current provider, and get rid of carbon emissions-heavy legacy tech in favour of greener, cloud-native alternatives.
Minor tweaks will help to reduce your CO2 emissions and it’s important to know that even a 0.1% speed improvement, for example, can represent thousands or even millions more in revenue.
3
Use synthetic monitoring
Think of this as your ‘online mystery shopper’ or an automated e-store monitor where you can plug it in to find, fix, and prevent online issues. This can be the difference between your website surviving and thriving or flatlining altogether.
With synthetic monitoring you have the power to understand website availability, performance, and security risks. This can all greatly improve your checkout/basket pages and overall conversion rate.
When you get into the habit of conducting regular checks – or you let the monitoring tool do it all for you – it will empower you to act fast to improve the customer experience and your eco-credentials, as a result.
Watch out for Magecart attacks
Whether easyJet’s January 2020 cybersecurity incident that affected nine million customers, Emma Sleep’s online hack which impacted consumers in 12 different countries, or British Airways’ 15-day long web skimming attack, no matter how big your business and budget is, you could still be the victim of costly data breaches.
Magecart is the number one security issue for ecommerce brands, in particular.
Click the headings to learn some ways to help prevent your brand from becoming the next news headline:
1
Review your IT infrastructure
Remove/update legacy software immediately and ideally install Google’s Safe Browsing list application.
2
Invest in security headers
When you have a HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) header, this can ensure all traffic and data types on sites are encrypted.
Meanwhile, a Content Security Policy header can be used to control what your website interacts with.
3
Check your payments methods
Monitor your online transaction forms regularly.
Some positive news concerns the recent Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS v4.0) developments. These revisions mean it will become compulsory for organisations to secure and lock down all their online payment pages.
4
Test all third-party activity
Whether you use a supplier for advertising, analytics, fonts or image libraries, your business is only as secure as your weakest third party.
Attack detection software doesn’t have to be costly and allows you to monitor third parties, placing them on a ‘Trusted’ or ‘Untrusted’ list.
By regularly reviewing your website and getting to know what’s working and what could be improved, you’re showing a commitment to enhancing your brand’s online presence. And when it’s high performing, this lands very favourably with existing customers and prospects who have a better experience.
Your audience wants to invest in organisations that care about them and their user journeys, so make sure your virtual offering is operating at a level which positively impacts your bottom line – rather than hampers it.
Gav Winter is CEO of Leeds-based cybersecurity and website performance specialist RapidSpike.
Next steps…
- If you are an UMi Sat Nav user, get your free Digital Health Check – not signed up yet? You can sign up here.
- Check your website’s loading speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights
- Get on top of your image sizing using Shopify’s top 10 tips for optimising images.
- Read Gav Winter’s guide to website monitoring solutions.