Consumed by the holiday hustle and bustle, many marketers overlook the most important part of a successful online user experience in their seasonal campaigns — web performance.
What to hear something scary? Websites that take longer than three seconds to load immediately lose 80 percent of site visitors, with 40 percent never to return. What’s more, every one-second delay results in a 16 percent drop in customer satisfaction. That’s nothing short of terrifying!
Even scarier? Widgets. Sure, they look cute, but these little monsters actually devour sites left and right. In fact, even the most popular marketing widgets are like vampires, sucking the speed out of a website, dragging down performance and harming your conversion. Yes, you read correctly: All those must-have, third-party widgets that are touted for improving your marketing efforts end up killing your conversion rates, as every one-second website delay causes conversions to plummet by seven percent.
Marketers, it’s time to take back control: Stop poor web performance from killing your holiday marketing dreams. With a few quick adjustments, you can tame widgets, bring bounces back under control and send conversion rates soaring. Here’s how:
- Review and remove unnecessary widgets. And before making future additions, assess whether it’s going to drive engagement and add value, or if it’s simply a trendy or aesthetic choice.
- Assess performance of widgets already in place. How? By examining the asset in a waterfall chart, such as websitetest.com and webpagetest.org. If any one widget is dragging down performance noticeably, it might be time to say sayonara.
- Prevent issues from problematic widgets. For the third-party assets you simply can’t live without, the best way to maintain performance is to ensure that they load asynchronously.
For example, below are two javascript options to add the Facebook widget to your web page.
The worst: This script will completely block page loading if getting the script is slow.
<scripttype="text/javascript"src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script>
The next worst: This script will impact the rendering performance of your application.
<script type='text/javascript'>
(function(){
var po = document.createElement('script');
po.type = 'text/javascript';
po.async = true;
po.onload = function(event) {
console.log('called?');
};
po.src ='//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);
})();
</script>
Your best choice is to defer loading the third-party component until the user requires it and never load it before the page is fully rendered.
For more widget wisdom and tips for improving web performance in time for the holiday rush, take a look at our Holiday eCommerce Survival Guide.
Above all, it’s important to keep your main objective in mind: People are visiting your site to buy something, not to share. And a poor experience is certainly not something you want your users sharing with others!