Are Your Features Keeping You from Being Featured?
Optimizing the efficiency of your website is the key to ensuring that your business will succeed. It is no longer effective for a person just to have a site with strong text. Visuals, engagement, and social interaction features are required. Mobile friendly sites are a must, SEO concentration is mandatory, and organic content is a site’s lifeblood. But what happens when a person takes on the mantle of doing all the needed themselves? In most cases, the business suffers, primarily because the person who must build, maintain, SEO, and update the site does not have enough hours in the day to optimize the site properly. Yet, ever diligent, the business will seek to balance the scales by throwing plugins and features onto the site in a hope to drive traffic to it. Yet, that is dangerous for a business, and here is why.
Loading Times
The more features that a site has, the larger the site becomes. It is common mathematics. And while we are pressing into the 5G network and have upload speeds are continuously increasing, we have not yet obtained complete instantaneous loading. The downside to this is that the average user wants to have instantaneous loading. According to Jakob Nielson, of the Nielsen Norman Group, a person has 1.0-second expectancy on loading and a 10-second window to gain and retain their attention.
Should your features and plug-ins on the site require the spinner circle, your business is more apt to lose the attention and therefore the business of the individual. If you have 3D Models, pictures, or video content, ensure that you have enabled compression turned on. Optimize your images, minimize your scripts, and avoid multiple plug-ins and features from trying to load simultaneously. Ideally, you want to have a server response time of under 200ms. This is not obtainable if you have several videos, CSS Scripts, PHP plug-ins, as well as images, text, and metadata which needs to load.
Third Party Features
While there are a lot of credible plug-ins and features that can be integrated into a business’s site, there are several that are also not. Just because it may be expedient for a person to use a free application does not dictate safe usage. Nor does it guarantee that the plug-in will remain current with HTML standards. This creates a two-fold issue. First, the CSS, PHP, or Java which is used for the third party feature may steal private information and sell it to other third parties. This would then result in a bombardment of spam (at the least) to your existing clientele. As no one loves spam, you would be quite apt to lose customers. Secondly, even if the app does not steal data, if the HTML is not current, then it could glitch or give your page the dreaded Page 404.
The Solution
Having an aesthetically pleasing website as well as one which is optimized for UI and UX is a substantial factor in the longevity of your business. Therefore, when you chose the plug-ins and features for your site do so with tact. Only chose the plug-ins and features which you cannot code into the site yourself. Remember, the more packages and coding stacks you make for a page, the longer it will take to load. When choosing 3D elements use a reputable website such as CGTrader to minimize the risk of embedded spam and malware, ensuring that you optimize the render/image for quicker loading. When using plug-ins and features on your site, stagger them to different pages if you are not using a one-page parallax format. This not only decreases load time but also encourages interactivity.
A Final Thought
Though plug-ins and features for a site are important, businesses should remember that they are trying to reach target audiences to engage in investing capital in their venue. The more features from third parties which are implemented into the site, the more prone the person is to become confused as to which content is for the business and which content is just fluff.
Should you find that your business’s website is slow, that your engagement and analytics is failing, and that your web developer is frustrated, it may be that too much is upon his or her shoulders. Allocating funds to an SEO team, IT professional, or to a web development team may be your best option. In today’s world, the website is the main form of business. If it appears that your business is nonprofessional, or if the page is too slow, it will be treated much in the same manner as a physical brick-and-mortar business which fails to meet the demands of its clients, it will shut down. Don’t let your features keep you from getting featured.
