Stop! What effect will it have on $?
Raising revenue once more this week, specifically with an eye on fitting a revenue strategy into the everyday running of your website. Some businesses suffer from “too many cooks,” an issue that needs to be addressed as it may be hurting your revenue potential.
What I learned
- Is your site carrying too much baggage?
- A lighter site is a faster site
- Don’t add anything before calculating its impact
- How will changes affect revenue?
- Fix issues before making changes
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers, and big hello to Pubcon, Florida at the moment going on. I want to talk to you today about revenue again, but in the context of where it fits in the day to day of getting things done on your site. Because quite often, in medium sized organisations, there might be a lot of people involved in the website, or that have vested interests on the real estate of the website. There’s an argument going on about what we should have on the front page, what we should have on the footers, the menu. The thing that you’ve got to remember if you’re a retailer is that what you’re looking to do, or what you should be looking to do first, is to strip that site back, so it has the least amount of baggage as possible.
Stripped for speed
What I mean by baggage, I mean just things like what we would call normal code bloat. A lot of these themes that are built out there from Magenta and everything else, they’ll contain a lot of stuff, that a lot of you just won’t even use. But most of you have basically…Your developers have pushed everything live, and I liken it to a hot air balloon. You’ve gotta get as much off and out of that basket, or else your passengers are going to keep bailing before it hits the ground, because that’s it slowing down, right?
This site here, right? It has a one out of one hundred for performance. It does quite well. It does quite well, despite that. However, it could be doing a little better. The problem is, is there’s a lot of baggage in the theme that’s come along with that developer that they’ve installed. Chances are there’s databases used there that we have to have a look at, and a bunch of other things as well. But, before you add anything to your site…Because we have a lot of conversations with people saying, “Well, why don’t we add a calculator.” Or, “Why don’t we add a this, or a little survey at the end, or a little….” Before you add any widget, you’ve got to know and understand what impact that’s going to have on the rest of the site. What sort of load it’s going to have on the site.
How does it affect revenue?
If someone can’t interact with your web page for at least 30 seconds, then there’s a bit of an issue there that you’ve got to fix before you do anything else. In the case of the client I was talking about last week, they wanted to put a survey on the checkout page to find out why all the people are dropping off. Now, my point to them is that, well that checkout page is taking 30 seconds to load. Chances are, by the time the user actually sees that survey, they’re gone. Right? Why don’t we just make that page faster. Lighter, faster. Then, if we still have a problem, with the drop-offs, take the survey then.
But strip things back. We have a mantra in the organisation which is before you do anything, ask yourself how it affects revenue. If you can’t answer in the positive, you’ve got to say, “Well why are we doing this?” There might be…Someone might say, “Oh, get us to number one.” I had this conversation yesterday. Get us to number one for X. I said, “Okay, well that might take 15 hours to do that. Yeah, and it’ll possibly bring along quite a bit of traffic with it too.” But then you’ve got to say, “Well, 15 hours doing that, or should we be spending 15 hours going through all your JavaScript and working out what you are, and what you aren’t, using, and then tossing out what you’re not using, and then making the whole user experience a lot quicker, and make it easier to transact for the customers that you’ve already got.
Hopefully that’s helpful, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much everyone. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
