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Page speed insights

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I’ve done two SEO reports within the last couple of months for businesses in two different industries and both of them had serious page load issues. This can have a serious knock on effect for both SEO and engagement or conversion.

Optimise web images

Site 1, a luxury travel brand, had used big glossy images all over the site. They had the big splash banners that are so beloved by website designers and some lovely person had uploaded full-size high resolution images. The website didn’t have any image resizing software installed so the consequence was that each page took over 7 seconds to load. Optimising images is a complex task, but as a simple rule of thumb the image should be saved to web (72dpi) and not print resolution (300dpi).

Minimise site files

Site 2, an automotive accessory firm, had large css files and numerous javascript files, (there is a price to pay for that fancy slide automation!) each of which needed to load before the page could complete. These pages were taking over 12 seconds to load! This can be solved by minification of the files and Google themselves provide a number of links to online tools that can be used for this process.

Search engine ranking factor

Site speed is a key search engine ranking factor, cited as one of the top five ranking factors in 2015 by SEO experts. In addition to this, users will click away from the site if a page takes too long to load. There is research to demonstrate the drop off rate can be as dramatic as 11% in a second.  As engagement with pages is also a ranking factor, it is well worth checking your site to ensure that your pages are optimised to their best.  Not least to prevent loss of custom.

Design collaboration with business stakeholders

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I’m interested to read the UX professionals survey by NN Group as they advocate the use of round tables with the business owner to review the initial designs and pick and choose the best of each design. In my experience, this doesn’t result in a cohesive whole. Many of the designers I have worked with have not been given credence by the business owner to use their expertise and bring the best result. They have been forced to use a number of elements from different designs in one, making the end result less than a choice of one of the original designs.

Website agency collaboration

On the other hand, I am wholeheartedly in agreement with the suggestions that UX designers should work together with other members of their team – project managers, business analysts or account managers, marketing AND technical development staff to ensure that the options that they share with a business owner, either remotely or in a presentation meeting, are checked for usability and errors before sharing them with the client. It’s always useful to bounce ideas off other creatives and the rest of the team. And it is crucial for designs (and software) to be tested internally and in user testing.  This has become much easier to do with online creative tools and user testing services.

UX design expertise

In both cases, though, too many cooks can spoil the broth and the collaborators do need to bow to the knowledge of the key decision maker, in this case, the UX designer.

No one is signing up to my email newsletters

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Let’s overlook the obvious first check to make, which is how many people are visiting that page, and take a quick look at another issue that might be the cause.

I tried to sign up this morning to a good cause – it had quite an unusual spam check, I thought – the email newsletter sign up had a range slider bar. The user has to slide the slider to the right to unlock the sign up form and be able to submit it. Except the slider doesn’t work on Android devices… To select the active state and slide, you need to long press, which opens the new link dialogue with the open link, open link in a new window, etc options.

Spam protection holds it up

We’ve all experienced someone getting hold of our business contact forms and spamming us to death with hundreds or thousands of emails, hence the need for this kind of spam protection. However, we do need to be sure that the method we choose to protect our forms is still valid from a usability point of view. There are plenty of ways to validate a new user on an email sign up form that don’t prevent genuine users who are trying to engage with your business from signing up.

It is also worth testing your email sign up on as many devices as you can (assuming your web design agency hasn’t already done this).

My inbox is full

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My inbox is full of emails from Pay4Later, Paypal and Channel Advisor regarding Singles Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday with tips on how to use email marketing to maximise the benefit of these key retail dates and gain those extra sales. It’s also full of the eCommerce retailers that I have signed up for trying to do the same.

Email offers great conversion opportunities

I still meet many online retailers who don’t take advantage of their existing customer data and contact their customers regularly. It is proven that conversion from email marketing is one of the most cost effective forms of promotion, so why are there still companies who don’t use email marketing software to send out emails?

Email frequency

We’ve all encountered that web store that sends you weekly, daily and even hourly emails after you’ve not noticed the box that needed to be ticked or unticked, or the small print was indecipherable or incomprehensible, and been deluged with emails that we didn’t really want. Some of these even contravene the law by not carrying an unsubscribe link. I think the genuine shop owner can make the sign up process clear and they can also spend some time working out how often their customers want to hear from them (you can even ask!)

Kiss me goodbye when I unsubscribe

When I decide I want to unsubscribe from your newsletters Keep It Simple Stupid – make it easy to do so. Forcing a customer to jump through hoops to stop unwanted emails is just asking for trouble and kiss them goodbye – a great marketing tactic is to say something nice at the final unsubscribe page. Even hardened marketers like me have been swayed by we will miss you messages into changing our minds about unsubscribing.

Can’t pay, they’ve taken the ability to make online payments away!

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In response to security concerns of SSL 3.0 vulnerability to Poodle attack, Sagepay are upgrading their system and subsequently have announced they won’t be supporting Internet Explorer 8 and older from the 2nd December. Does this really matter when these users make up less than 5% of the global users in 2015?

Biggest payment processing providers in the UK

It made me wonder who are the biggest payment providers in the UK and whether they offer services to older browser users. I can’t blame them for not supporting every legacy browser, especially if it makes them vulnerable, as security is their priority, but is it a real possibility that IE6, 7 & 8 users will soon see a day when they can’t pay for anything online?

The largest payment processors in the UK are likely to be Worldpay (+-40%), Barclays (+-20%), Global Payments who bought out HSBC’s merchant services (Global Iris and GP Webpay, +-20%) and Paypal (+-20%). Sagepay is a small but growing member of this band. Worldpay offer limited browser compatibility for IE8 but full compatibility from IE9+, Barclays appears to be IE9+, Sagepay (from December) IE9+, and though I can’t find a browser compatibility list for Global Payments or Paypal, Paypal ended community support for IE8 in July 2015 and the forums are full of users who find the pages don’t work in older IE versions.

So yes, this could be a real problem for older browser users. What can be done about it? For the consumer, upgrade your Internet Explorer (at cost) or download a free modern browser (Chrome or Firefox). For a shop owner, some kind of message along the lines of ‘these payment pages work best in IE9 and above, we recommend you upgrade’ would help users.

Know your panda from your penguin?

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I was asked recently to explain the difference between these two algorithm changes made by Google in 2011 and 2012 respectively.

Panda, named after a Google engineer, was designed to root out real content. It was no longer enough to stuff a bunch of keywords onto a page to achieve page one ranking. Google got smarter about checking the rest of the page and the site for real relevant content.

Penguin on the other hand went looking for backlinks or inbound links and measured the quality of the domain that they came from and what the links actually said about the site they were linking to.

Algorithm changes

The double whammy of these two changes coming within a year of each other toppled many a website that had enjoyed page one dominance, especially those which had used somewhat underhand tactics to get there.

I was lucky enough at the time of these seachanges to be working for a web agency that had always practiced what they preached in terms of SEO and their websites, while not unaffected, benefited from a solid structure and optimisation advice.

Hummingbird – a total rewrite of Google

The next update to happen along caused less ruffled feathers than the previous two but was in fact even bigger. Rather than a change in algorithm, Hummingbird was an overhaul of the whole, keeping the engine humming along (pardon the pun). It makes Google much smarter at figuring out who in the internet world is a genuine supplier of the services or goods described.

Update: In case you didn’t know Panda, now on update 28, and Penguin are still rolling out today.