Today's video is about a certain kind of website optimization that can provide a big but almost invisible benefit to your business.
What you'll discover in the video is a distinction between how much traffic you're theoretically getting and how much (useful) traffic you're really getting and it's a distinction that is partially lost to your web analytics tool.
Watch the video to see exactly what I mean.​
More...
Links
- Click here to see a case study of how speed increase on a website lead to more measurable traffic (as well as the "invisible" increase we talk about here).
- Click here to see my tutorial on making your website load faster (specifically for WordPress websites). If you use a Thrive Theme, you can ignore the image optimization part in this tutorial, since we automatically optimize images using a better service than the ones mentioned in the post. 🙂
Over to you: when it comes to improving your website's speed, what are the biggest challenges you struggle with?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and any other comments you have about today's video!
Very interesting observation you pointed out there Shane! I never thought about this myself. My biggest concern so far has been how to choose hosting, and which plugins really would be beneficial enough for me to add to my site while not effecting speed too much. Not everyone has the money in the beginning to pay for excellent hosting, and also not everyone has the time and knowledge to run and maintain a self hosted server. Thrive Themes is a brilliant choice for templates, but if one chooses the wrong kind of hosting.. I would be interested in hearing your opinion on what hosting solution to go with 🙂
Hello Claudia,
I agree about the hosting issue. I wish I could make a simple recommendation but unfortunately, I’ve not had great luck with higher-end hosting myself. Tried a few solutions, but haven’t found one I’d be happy to recommend yet. I’ll stay on the hunt, though and I’ll definitely post about it once I find a worthy host. 🙂
Great information Shane! I couldn’t agree more about the importance of site load speed. Of course with Thrive Themes, this issue is non-existent. One element I would like to see included is image compression features. I know that you already have something like this built into the theme, but does it optimize images during upload? Several of my clients when uploading new images to their site forget to “resize” them properly. This in turn can really slow down a site if there are a lot of images. I know that there are some plugins that will automatically resize/optimize images upon upload. How does Thrive Themes address this?
Thanks again for an amazing product and keep up the great work!
Hi Chris,
Our image optimization feature compresses images as they are uploaded, yes. This makes the image file size a lot smaller, but if someone uploads an image with huge (pixel) dimensions, that’s an issue we can’t address – or at least, we haven’t found a way to do that yet.
Good catch!
All too often, I see my clients not understanding the very metrics they use to run their businesses. The worse thing about this is that they are operating under the “illusion of knowledge” vs. clients who are not using metrics (who know or at least admit under questioning that they are ignorant).
Your information is timely because, unlike metrics my clients gather in house using their own people and equipment, website analytics is done by someone else and may not always tell you the “truth” – just what they measure.
Knowing how to interpret this measure-truth gap is critical when you cannot fix said gap. It ensures actions taken to improve results target positive change (or at the very least do not unwittingly promote a negative change).
Better an intelligently interpreted measure than no measure at all!
Trevor
Thanks for your comment, Trevor. I agree that having the wrong kinds of metrics and having a little (but not enough) knowledge about what metrics mean are about equally dangerous.
I’ve been diving deeper into this topic, the longer I’ve been running online businesses and my plan is to create more content about it here, as well.