13
Dec
Commercial agents: Get loaded quicker!
Faster, swifter, nippier, we all seem to want a quicker
response. We have become an impatient lot and nowhere more so than
when we surf the Internet.
3 Seconds to Keep Them
We’ve spoken at length about the 3 seconds that you have
to impress a commercial property customer when they first land on
your website. Those split seconds when they make a judgement on
your company, your professionalism, knowledge and even the
personality of you and the people you employ.
Yet it seems that split seconds can also have other positive
effects on the way customers interact and positively react to your
website. Research has shown that more than 50% of users will
navigate away from a website if it takes longer than three seconds
to load. Time enough for a prospective commercial instruction to be
lost.
Mobile Response
Commercial property clients are equally as demanding when
viewing websites via a
mobile device. Research carried out by Strangeloop Networks has
shown that more than half of mobile device users expect a website
to load as quickly on their mobile as on a conventional PC.
The most worrying finding for Chartered Surveyors and Commercial
Agents is that 40% of mobile users that give up on a slow loading
website will visit a competitors website next. Remember that within
the property sector, over 30% of the traffic to an agents website
already comes via a mobile device.
The Need For Speed
Perhaps our need for speed is something more biological and
those that can satisfy our need can profitably benefit from our
increasingly impatient nature.
One company that has leant how profitable speed can be is
Amazon. They found that for every 100 milliseconds that they could
increased page loading times, they saw a 1% increase in sales
across their whole website.
Getting The Customer To Read On
A Chartered Surveyors website is the first place where
prospective customers learn more about them. If you capture their
attention and convey the right impression they’ll read on.
Only then will they see the great work you’ve done, the
wonderful clients you have and your depth of knowledge in the local
commercial property market.
AOL found that users in the top 10% of site speed viewed about
50% more pages than visitors in the bottom 10%.
Speedy Top Google Rankings
Since April of last year, Google has factored website speed into
its search ranking
algorithm. That means that a slow website will affect your
Google ranking and could put you behind your faster responding
competition.
What Affects My Page Speed?
A collection of design and structural elements will influence
the speed of your website. If you have a
website that is over 5 years old (and many, many of you do),
the chances are that the poor and outdate coding used to construct
the site will be contributing to your slow page load times.
Flash and large image files also play their part and the way
that they are delivered.
In conclusion
Delivering faster information and a quicker experience on your
website will increase the chances of being contacted by prospective
customer. But if your page load times are slower than the magic
three seconds, you could be losing over 50% of your prospective
customers to your competition.
Philip Burrows, Marketing
Consultant
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