THIS is Essential for Your Web Site

Does your web site have it?

The whole purpose of the web is to make things easier.

Search allows you to get information very quickly about any topic imagineable.

But I see web sites every day that take forever to load, because of complex animation, or perhaps because they’re just poorly designed.

A new brain study shows that clunky, slow web sites require much greater concentration from users — up to 50% more focus — and this alone makes using that web site stressful for the consumer.

It’s hard to be open to your message when stressed.

GOOGLE believes that fast-loading pages are so important they’ve made load time one of their ranking factors. The faster your home page loads, the higher you appear in a Google search.

Clearly, there are a multitude of issues on most radio station web sites: clutter, over-commercialization, weak indexing, and boring content. Most seem designed more to drive me away than welcome me in, but since Sales controls almost all the content on station sites now, there’s probably not much you can do to change that now.

However, load time should be something you can improve.

And testing your load time from within your office isn’t all that helpful, because chances are your station uses a T-1 line, or has some other form of super-fast connection, which most of your listeners probably do not have.

Try going to a local motel with your laptop. Test the speed there, and if your site is clunky and slow, talk to your web site developer to find out how to speed it up.

It’s becoming the most important thing you can do to encourage repeat visitors and WOM buzz.

Be a cheetah, not a sloth.

sloth