Seven Ways to Shed Weight Fast!...For Your Website

With the holiday season and all of its excesses in the rearview mirror, for many of us, our thoughts turn next to resolution-making, specifically vowing to shed the extra pounds that are the collective result of any number of regrettable dietary choices made over the course of past months, from digging into the kids’ trick-or-treating bags to raiding the fridge for Thanksgiving leftovers to a daily egg nog latte habit. But while we’re in resolution-making mode, we’d do well to think not only about how to trim our waistlines but also how to slim down our websites. Why? Just like all those little culinary indulgences add up to extra pounds on our bodies, the small additions you might have made here and there on your website can weigh it down and leave its performance in the same type of sluggish slump as you might feel after one too many pieces of grandma’s pumpkin pie.

The problem

Today’s websites have become bloated, with the average web page tipping the scales at over 2 megabytes. That may not sound like much in an era when we’re well accustomed to talking in terms of gigabytes and even terabytes. However, when it comes to the Web, even 2 megabytes is too much, especially for visitors using low bandwidth or mobile devices, who are likely to leave your site rather than wait for a too-slow page to load, leaving you in the perilous position of losing their business altogether. Hefty page weight and poor performance can also have a negative impact on your site’s search ranking, as Google and other search engines now include these elements as key factors in their algorithms. As a result, streamlining the size of your web pages is certainly a best practice, but where do you begin? Just as shedding pounds requires you to make changes in multiple aspects of your lifestyle, there are a number of aspects of your website that you can examine to find ways to trim the unnecessary dead weight that’s detrimental your site’s performance.

Your seven-step plan for website weight-loss success

1. Optimize images.

As giant, screen-spanning images have become a popular trend in website design, pages have gotten heavier and heavier over the years. One way you can make a drastic reduction in the weight of your web pages is to ensure that the images on your site are properly optimized for the Web and that you’re not serving unnecessarily large images to mobile devices with small screen sizes.

2. Retool HTML files.

HTML files also impact the download size of a page, so look for ways to optimize the code to reduce the overall size of the file. Although these savings are likely to be small, remember that even small changes can add up to measurable improvements.

3. Streamline style sheets.

Because CSS files must be downloaded in order for a user to view your site, poorly formatted files or loading of unnecessary styles can increase the size of downloads. Requiring multiple style sheets can also have a negative impact on performance, since each one will require a separate HTTP request to fetch that file.

4. Ditch JavaScript where possible.

Using JavaScript files or libraries is a common practice in modern website design, but when it comes to optimizing page download size, there are a few drawbacks to this approach. First, requiring an entire library for just one effect (like an animated carousel of images) is not the best use of bandwidth. It can also lead to a critical user experience fail if your website does not work as intended because a visitor has elected to disable JavaScript in their browser. In some cases, JavaScript may be necessary, but be sure to make the distinction between when it is truly a must-have versus when it is simply a nice-to-have feature.

5. Use Web fonts sparingly.

The rise of Web fonts has given designers much more flexibility in their application of typography on the Web. Instead of being forced to select from only a handful of Web-safe fonts, Web fonts allow new typefaces to be included with a site’s files or linked from a third-party resource, such as Google Fonts or Adobe’s Typekit service. While these solutions have greatly increased the options available to designers, they can also significantly impact the performance of a web page. Font files must be downloaded with the page, so it is important to keep these to a minimum. Requiring three or four different weights of one font may be attractive from a visual standpoint, but it will be brutal from a file size perspective.

6. Eliminate external feeds whenever possible.

Content that is pumped in from other sites, including social media feeds and ads from by a third-party provider, will absolutely slow a website down, as external feeds are notorious bandwidth hogs. While these resources are sometimes necessary, their use should be limited as much as possible.

7. Check for CMS dependencies.

If your site uses a content management system, there are likely to be aspects of that CMS and how it is configured that play a role in performance. Since CMS platforms draw their content from a database, the calls to that database can slow the download speed of your page if there are too many of them or if they are not configured properly.

Know your numbers

Just as you need a scale to help you gauge your progress toward your target weight, you also need tools to help you measure the impact the steps you’ve taken above have made in improving the performance of your website. The Website Speed Test from Dotcom Monitor is a great tool that allows you to “instantly test your website speed in real browsers from 23 locations worldwide.” This application will not only tell you how large your page is but also measure its load time and reveal which elements contribute most to its size (similar tests are also available from Google). Armed with this data, you can charge forth with confidence, knowing that your website will soon be a leaner, meaner business growth machine – no fad diets or gym memberships required!

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Remarketing: A Second Chance at Love

Consider this bit of classic situation comedy:

Guy meets girl at a laundromat.

Girl gives guy her number.

Guy accidentally washes the receipt she wrote it on.

All hope of love is lost.

The poor schlep. If only he had a second chance, right?

Fortunately for him, we’re all familiar enough with TV tropes to know that their story doesn’t end there. Fate will intercede to bring them together again, and all will be well.

Fortunately for you, the story of you and your prospective customers can have a similar happy ending.

In many ways, marketing is like dating. There’s an initial introduction, followed by a period of wooing to secure their digits (or email address or mailing address or Facebook “like,” as the case may be). Every step – and every hour and every dollar spent – along the way in nurturing that relationship is designed to keep things moving through the proverbial funnel to greater levels of commitment until you arrive at a proposal (call to action) and the resulting commitment (conversion).

But what if, in spite of your best efforts to get your customer to the alter (the checkout or contact form), they lose interest, forget you exist (ouch!) or, worst of all, go AWOL before clicking “submit”? Like the guy in the laundromat, you need a second chance.

Enter remarketing – the fairy godmother of sales.

Reunited and it feels so good

As we’ve covered previously, there are plenty of things you can do both to optimize your chances of converting a new customer and to minimize the odds that a shopper will walk away from their cart mid-session.

Inevitably though, despite your best efforts, some prospective buyers will simply fall through the cracks. They might decide they need more time to consider their purchase, or they might be pulled away from the computer by one of the many distractions of daily life. Whatever the reason, unlike our friend in the laundromat, you don’t have to rely on fate to reunite you. You have more than a damp blank receipt in your pocket; you have the ability to deploy remarketing.

In principle, remarketing is not rocket science. It’s exactly what it sounds like: reaching out once again to someone who has already responded to earlier marketing efforts and engaged with your brand on some level. Essentially, it’s preaching to the converted – or nearly converted – if you will.

More specifically, remarketing uses information collected about a visitor’s activity on your site (e.g., viewing a product page, adding a product to their shopping cart, etc.) to put your brand and your products in front of them again via a highly targeted follow-up message that’s customized based upon parameters relating to the actions they took while on your site.

Typically, this follow-up is executed in one of two ways: either by pushing ads for your products out to other sites they visit as they continue browsing or by sending an email message directly to them if their contact information is available to you. These ads and emails typically feature tailored messages and images designed specifically to re-engage the prospect in the action they previously abandoned based on information collected about their browsing activity.

The nitty gritty

How on earth does this work?

What’s happening behind the scenes is that a code snippet provided by your analytics resource of choice (e.g., Google AdWords) is embedded into the source code of strategically selected pages of your site.

This code then places a cookie into the browsers of those who visit such a page on your site, assigning specific information about their visit. These cookied visitors are skimmed off into a new “audience” within your analytics and sent customized ads over advertising networks known as Demand Side Platforms (DSPs). Google AdWords is the probably the best known DSP, but there are a host of others out there, many of which claim to specialize in remarketing. Alternately, recipients of remarketing may instead receive automated, custom-tailored emails if that visitor has previously provided their contact information to you.

The proof is in the ebelskiver

Let’s consider an example that’s close to home (pun intended). My wife recently visited the Williams-Sonoma website in search of a special pan required to make her latest obsession: tiny filled pancakes known as ebelskivers.

She located the tart-maker on the site but did not select the option to “Add to Basket.” Within a few hours, she received the following email (because she had registered to receive updates from the company previously, they already had her email address on file):

The “Buy Now” button embedded within this message took her directly back to the page for the product, just one convenient click away from purchase.

“Hello, Clarice.”

One word of caution: as with any marketing strategy, you must always implement this tactic in ways that show respect for your customers and reinforce – rather than undermine – the trust they have in your company and your brand.

Overly eager DSPs will promise to make it rain, but there’s a fine line between a gentle reminder and creepy stalking – or “cookie bombing”.

A retargeted ad that reminds a visitor that they have items remaining in their shopping cart is a courteous customer service gesture. Bombarding them with the same ad for days or weeks will come off as a much more self-serving ploy that’s likely to cost you not only the potential sale that’s currently on the table but any future business from that customer as well.

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