For many small businesses, getting a website up and running is a big moment on their growth journey. A website brings the ability to sell directly to customers, list products in detail and update potential customers on products and services.
While this is such a positive step, building and running a website are very different things with a website needing the same attention to detail that all other aspects of a business need, with a key aspect of this being to ensure page load times are low. The reason for targeting fast page load times is that there's plenty of data online which shows that the faster a website loads, the higher the conversion rate is.
At DO Digitel we also have first hand experience of this, working with a large, international e-commerce retailer in the fashion sector, we helped to improve Google Page Speed Insight performance scores from 25 to 95. The results of this was a 94% increase in website traffic from organic search and a 120% increase in revenue.
This is a prime example of how investing in website load times and user experience can deliver real increases in commercial results for a business and this is not the preserve of large retailers with big digital budgets.
With the right knowledge, anyone running a website can improve how quickly it loads and see benefits from their work. Even if you don't have the knowledge or experience to improve all aspects yourself, with the right data you're empowered to ask the right questions of the people who run your website for them and keep them accountable.
So how can PaceSetter help?
There are plenty of tools which exist to help website developers review the load time of a page. For the most part though, these are very technical and focused towards an audience with technical knowledge. Equally, these platforms also only provide information for a single page at a time, at that specific moment.
PaceSetter is intended to put the business owner in control. By monitoring load data daily and showing the change over time, business owners can see if their website is getting faster or slower and in turn ask their website developers to explain why and how they can improve it.
Of course not all of the things which impact website speed are the result of developers and there are plenty of things which content creators and website owners can do to improve the scores awarded by Google Page Speed Insights and Core Web Vitals. Inside PaceSetter, we're highlighting the things you can do and sharing guides, hints and tips with you on how to fix them, meaning that you can start making improvements while your web team work in the background.
It's all too much effort though!
You might feel like it's a huge job to get your website loading more effectively and in some cases it can be, however that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. We've seen studies in the past that suggest a website which loads in 2.4 seconds compared to 5.9 has an average CVR increase of 217%.
In our example which can be seen on the PaceSetter page, this equates to over £142k extra revenue per year, it suddenly doesn't sound like too much effort, does it?
Getting Started With PaceSetter
Getting started with PaceSetter couldn't be easier, simply create an account and then you can start tracking your website's key pages. Once you log in, you can add a new site by giving us an XML sitemap, or by supplying a list of important URLs.
From here PaceSetter then starts running daily reports to track important performance factors which are used by Google to understand page load performance. These are things like Page Speed Insights and Core Web Vitals scores.
Once your site has been tracking for more than a day, you'll start to see trended data over time which you can then use to identify the pages which are working well for you and which ones need further work. Where possible, we'll also give you hints, tips and advice on how to improve the issues yourself, or help you say the right things to your web developer so they know what you need them to do.
So why not get started today and find out what your website performance really is, and how you can improve it.
