Why You Should Care About Website Page Speed & Optimization…Even if You Don’t Work in Web Design or SEO

You are probably aware that website page speed and performance of your website will affect the number of visitors and leads you can attract to your business. And yet, unless you happen to work in B2B web design or search engine optimization (SEO), the concepts might seem pretty abstract.

This is something we run into all the time. When speaking with marketing managers, they stress the need for a fast, tightly coded, error-free website. However, they often have little idea about what they can do to affect these metrics.

The good news is that you don’t have to be an expert in programming, HTML, or any other technical discipline to get a high-performing website for your company. The even better news is that the gains you can secure from taking some basic steps are bigger than you might imagine. That’s because other marketing managers are also lost when talking about website performance. By doing a little more than they are, you can give your business a huge digital advantage.

In today’s post I am going to address three important topics. First, I will tell you why things like page speed and optimization matter. Then, I am going to give you a brief overview of what it takes to improve these factors. And finally, I am going to give you a practical piece of advice you can use to help your business grow.

Let’s start with the reason this topic is important in the first place.

Why Marketing Professionals Should Care About Technical Marketing Details

If you want your website to generate B2B leads, then you should be very concerned about website performance. Why? Because a fast and functional website attracts more visitors, impresses potential customers and clients, and helps you deliver results – i.e., qualified leads for your sales team.

In the first case, a high-performing website attracts customers because it allows you to pull more visits from Google and the other search engines. It has been known for many years that the world’s most powerful search algorithms show a strong preference for results that load quickly and without errors or security issues. There isn’t any complicated reason for this. The reality is that search engine users also like these things. So, giving them what they want is just good business for Google and Microsoft.

A now famous study shows that a first-time visitor to your website will only hang around for about three seconds before leaving if they aren’t engaged. As important as design and content are, you can’t even use them to make a good first impression if your pages don’t load in the first place.

This brings us back to the reality that good marketing managers simply have to pay attention to B2B web performance. It’s important to remember, however, that caring about website performance isn’t the same as managing it yourself. I will come back to this point again in just a moment.

How to Improve Website Page Speed and Performance 

Entire books and courses have been created on the topic of website page speed performance, so it’s impossible to go into a huge amount of detail here. And besides, it isn’t your job to actually fix your website. So, rather than bury you in technical details, I’ll just give you a quick list of issues that can be resolved to help your pages load more quickly and cleanly with the right B2B web design:

• Use the right content management system (CMS) to organize your pages.
• Resolve old or broken links within your website.
• Update your apps and CMS software to the latest versions.
• Format your pages with the right kinds of text, images, and tags.
• Use better or faster web hosting designed specifically for business.
• Make your site and content more visible to search engine spiders.
• Look for errors with coding, especially within plugins and JavaScript.
• Examine your core web vitals from time to time.

This is just a brief overview, touching on some of the issues we see most often. The truth is you might have some or all of these issues affecting you on your website.

It’s almost never the case that a website is completely clean; even the biggest companies, with the best web design and development teams, can struggle with certain elements from time to time. That’s just one of the risks of having a dynamic website that’s constantly being updated. Most B2B marketers, however, consider it a sweet spot. They can have lots of content for online lead generation while still keeping their websites manageable enough to avoid any major issues.

All it takes is a bit of intentionality and the right design and development partner.

It All Starts With the Right Question

If your website isn’t performing the way you want it to, or if you just aren’t sure whether it’s working as well as it could be, then you have to ask one of two questions. The first is: “Why isn’t my existing provider helping me solve these problems?” Or, if you don’t have a reliable B2B web design team on your side, then the question might be: “Who understands my market and can get my website moving in the right direction?”

In either case, the first step is going to be something we call a website audit. It’s a system of checks we use on client sites that go deep into performance and coding, looking for the issues I’ve already described (along with dozens of others).

Like a diagnostic test for your automobile, a website audit allows you to take a deeper look beneath the surface of your pages to see if page loading times, secure connections, and installed applications are all optimized. If they are, you have nothing to worry about. And if they aren’t, website audits give you a roadmap of what needs to be changed or repaired right away.

Interested in learning more? Check out our complimentary website audit service and enter your website to see how you stack up!