Mobile & desktop device, website speed, how do you check performance and fix any issues?

60-70% of your visitors will be on Mobile devices, so checking how your website performs, how fast it loads is critical, more than 3 secs and your traffic will go elsewhere!

Worse Google will downgrade the site and reduce your share of visitors even if your content deserves more!

Before we go into diagnosis, how do you STOP this happening in the first place?

Three key lessons to remember when designing a website.

1. Design is important, but has to be balanced with two other critical areas.

2. Content, if the content is not educational and interesting, and kept fresh and relevant - your wasting your time, Google's algorithms are a hard but fair task master.

3. Customer Journeys, think through who are your target audiences and what their specific pain points are each stage of their buying journey, and how they are going to be addressed, with what content.

Balancing the three conflicting priorities of design, content and customer journey & planning.

It takes less than a day to plan a website which will make it extremely easy to implement, especially with ChatGPT.

• Map the Personas who will buy, influence, evaluate.

• Map the pain points they have.

• Design the content to educate them into your funnel or persuade them to the next step.

• TIP Miro Boards are an easy free tool to help you map this. https://miro.com/

• And No we are not using ChatGPT for content, we are going to use it for ideas and planning alongside our Founder/Customer/Sales interviews.

Thinking Required - if its too painful, power up chatgpt 4.0 give it some hints, typical personas, ask it to identify pain points at each stage of the customer journey and in 30 minutes, you'll have a great start.

• Think through who buys the product or service?

• What pain points have they typically got?

• At each stage of their buying process, what do they need?

However, remember 1 important lesson and one important fact.

Fact 1 90% of buyers know what they want before they contact you.

Lesson 1 they will have done a pile of research before they talk to you, consulting their trusted resources, which a) is not you b) not your website.

So if that's the case why have a website?

Good question, however build into your planning putting information where they are likely to go:

• Google

• Forums

• Peers - LinkedIn

• Groups - LinkedIn

Now the penny is beginning to drop - Plan properly, do all the discovery first and building a website is actually easy. You'll get very quickly to the right starting content and journeys and then its personal preference on design.

So is deciding how to build a content strategy and placing that content so you drip feed potential buyers into your customer journeys & pipeline, that's where we come in. We remove that workload from you.

Again, there's a framework and a simple 1 hour workshop and you'll have a plan that is easy to execute.

It doesn't matter if its not 100% right, 90% will do, the key is actioning it and learning from the insights and your measurement tools.

Remember 99.9% of people get this wrong

Most folk start with an agency and a brainstorm and then go through painful iteration after iteration of web pages and content, till frankly, they begin to regret starting the process, sound familiar?

If you are like most folk remember this important lesson, agencies are like accountants and lawyers , they like to keep the clock ticking. Billable work is their business model, not results!

How to identify if you have been sold a pup website?

1. Measure everything

2. Google Lighthouse tells you technically, how fast the site is rendering - if the answer is more than 3 secs and your dead. It will also tell you what to fix.

3. Google Analytics tells you how much traffic your getting, which pages people are looking at and a tonne more.

4. Google Console will diagnose technical site/page issues and once their fixed let you tell Google you have fixed them.

5. SERanking - will tell you how your content is performing against key search words and phrases in Google.

   Note: 3 tools are Free and Seranking base level costs less than £10 a month.

When you have installed these four tools you will learn fast where you are and no one can then pull the wool over your eyes.

(Note: We offer a free Workshop to get you up and running, to clear the fog/uncertainty and paint a path towards success)

Now lets show you one of those tools, Google lighthouse, because like most companies 99.9%, you'll have built your website, the wrong way.

1. Without proper planning.

2. Without the right thinking structure.

3. And therefore what will have been conceived is a pup.

The good news 0.1% get it right, and you can join that 0.1% easily if you follow the right path.

How to measure if you have a pup website, tool no 1!

Steps

Instal Google Lighthouse - its a chrome extension

Mobile & desktop device website speed

Click top right in Google Chrome on the square object with two bumps top and right and a chunk missing out of the left.

Then after adding the extension - Load the website you want to check in your browser and without leaving that tab click on the lighthouse extension and ask it to run the report on mobile -see below

Click the generate report with the two blue options highlighted - it will take a minute or two to run

You will at the top of the report get these circles that are pretty intuitive numbers over 90 are in green, 70-89 in amber, below 70 in red.

You guessed it everything you want should be in green!

See below as it does just tell you the issues, it highlights what you need to fix to ensure mobile and desktop device website speed.

Each of these are can be expanded to divulge what issues you have-see below

Whilst the descriptions look like spanglish and technical , trust me these issues normally boil down to several key issues that are simple to fix.

The Top Issues are normally really simple

If you did get a design led agency that didn't balance content and customer journey as priorities, then you'll have Images that are pretty, but big files, that are slow to load.

If they didn't run Google Lighthouse on the page, to assess performance, they are incompetent and you should treat them accordingly.

Do not feel guilty of doing a bad job, the website builder should have done a better job explaining things properly, and we'd counsel you that your outtake is simply - learn your lesson, and then move forward.

FIX

1. Reload the website with images in the New WebP format not jpeg

2. Add a Pixel or similar compression tool /add in onto you website content management system, cost £10-24 a month, this will compress the images by typically 70% and guess what your site will run / load 70% faster

Ask your webmaster if the content management system or website host compresses pages/images on the server side.

Trust me the above is about 30-60 minutes work on a typical website.

Want a Free Workshop WhatsApp Simon Hunt +44 (0) 7966 040188