If your website is running slow – then YES – chances are your Social Marketing and possibly your SEO are a waste of time. We have previously blogged about this but we thought we would blog again as it is such a huge issue. We regularly click on links in Twitter, FaceBook and other social media networks that lead to slow web pages. Recently a click on a link in Twitter to digital awards website took over 13 seconds to load – I know I waited for it for to load then checked the site several times with GTMetrix and Pingdom. The PageSpeed score, YSlow score were also really poor, you can see the result below:
Below is the result from a printing company that is a prolific tweeter:
Would you wait this long for a site to load? Probably not.
What is the aim of Social Marketing?
The aim of Social Marketing is to drive visitors to your website where you hope they will purchase your goods and/or services. Your website is where you want to drive your visitors – we all know that people do not like slow websites and will hit the back button. Numerous reports show that if a site does not load within 2 to 3 seconds then you have probably lost that visitor and they will hit the back button.
The aim of our social marketing is to get people on to our website to purchase our service – yes I know that our service is specifically to do with the speed of WordPress sites so our site does need to perform well. However it does not matter what your website is promoting – it needs to be quick or users will click that back button.
Slow Website affects search rankings.
We all want to come up high in search engine rankings and lots of us have employed or do employ SEO guru’s and Marketing Companies to help us generate great social marketing, great content for our sites to help with rankings. A slow website with poor PageSpeed and YSlow scores could result in all this hard work being for nothing.
Call to action for SEO and Social Marketing companies
Check your customers websites, it is really simple to do; just visit https://gtmetrix.com, create a free account so you can set the Analysis settings to test from the UK. Once your account is setup enter the URL and click Analyse. If the results are low then your client needs to sort out their website as part of the SEO and Social Marketing strategy – if not they are going to complain to you that your not doing your job as they are not seeing increased traffic and sales. You can even download a report that will high light issues with the site.
Call to action for website owners
Before you employee the services of SEO or Social Marketing experts make sure your site is ready. Follow the steps above and check your site is ready.
