3 technical errors that are costing you sales in Q4 and how to fix them?

Many industry studies show that loading speed significantly reduces conversion rates. No one likes to wait, and this comes as no surprise. Especially on the internet, we are used to visiting a website and having the content load in a fraction of a second. A few seconds of waiting is already a flashpoint that usually ends in user frustration and abandonment of the site.

How quickly do users give up waiting? On average, it takes 2.75 seconds to leave a website and choose another one from the search results. This means that in terms of retaining users and leading them to the conversion process, the loading time of a website is crucial – it is the first point of contact between a potential customer and your website! If you don’t provide a good experience at this stage, the user won’t even get to see your offer.

Source: nitropack.io

Here is some data to illustrate the scale of page speed’s impact on conversion. Team NitroPack, in collaboration with Google, conducted research showing that improving page load time by just 0.1 seconds can lead to conversion increases of up to 10.1% in the travel industry, 8.4% in e-commerce, and 3.6% in the luxury industry. The research report indicated (1) that the most important factor for monitoring and improving this problem is Core Web Vitals, which we will discuss in more detail in a moment.

Source: nitropack.io

How to interpret Page Speed Insights results and what is actually useful?

When we think about diagnosing website speed issues, the first tool that usually comes to mind is Page Speed Insights. We look at the circle with a performance score from 0 to 100, and if it’s green, we’re happy. At this point, a disclaimer: classic PSI results are absolutely irrelevant!

What will really matter are the indicators below, namely Core Web Vitals:

Why is it worth looking at these indicators? These results are based on real user visits to your website, and the aforementioned circle with a score from 0 to 100 is a single test at a given moment. After all, the point is not to do well in tests, but to ensure that users are not annoyed by slow loading times when visiting your website.

To verify Core Web Vitals results, I recommend another free tool from Google: https://cruxvis.withgoogle.com/. There, you can ascertain CWV over time and easily switch between metrics or, for example, device types. This certainly gives you a broader view of the data than the Page Speed Insights report.

How to fix Core Web Vitals issues on your website?

Have you checked your website and found that the results are not the best? The problems can be very different, but below I have listed a few that I have encountered most often in my career:

• Slider on the home page. This element can significantly slow down the website, and the user will usually scroll down before the slide changes anyway. I recommend testing the removal of the slider and performing another CWV audit after some time.
• Old and unnecessary plugins and add-ons. Especially for WordPress, thoroughly review all installed extensions. You will likely find things there that you haven’t used in a long time and which, due to a lack of updates, are slowing down the website.
• Photos are in the wrong format and size. This is a widespread mistake – you have high-quality images and want them to look just as great on your website. You can achieve the same effect without adding 4000×3000 px graphics to your website.
• Unnecessary JS code. When optimizing page loading speed, we should follow the principle of less is more. If you use a lot of JS on your website, e.g., for various visual effects, consider whether it is really necessary and whether it adds value to users. If not, reduce JS use.
• Instant loading of all elements on the page. If your website has extensive content and many multimedia elements, consider lazy loading. This technique allows the most critical components to be loaded first, followed by the rest, e.g., those located lower on the page. This allows the user to quickly see the page’s initial view while the lower elements load in the background.
• Server-side problem. Sometimes everything on the page may be fine, but the server may not be able to handle the load. If you decide that the server is affecting page load time, I recommend a change, especially if you are aiming to attract more traffic.

At Delante, we can help you speed up your website! Contact us, and we will be happy to conduct a CWV audit, find the source of the problem, and improve the user experience.

Website indexing issues usually affect larger websites, such as e-commerce sites, rather than small service websites. Why? In e-commerce, we typically have several thousand product URLs. Each of them ranks well for long-tail phrases, whose search volume may not be significant; sometimes, even tools show values close to zero, but it will be traffic with high purchase intent. If someone is looking for a specific product with a precise description of the variant they want, they are very likely to buy it.

Product URLs are usually located deep within the website structure. They are unlikely to attract external links – after all, they may sell out or be withdrawn from the offer, so in most cases it is not profitable to invest in link building here. So, for example, if we have 300 products in one category and they are only available via pagination, e.g., on page 25, it is very possible that Google will not reach those products – this is a natural recipe for indexing problems. If Google cannot find and index, for example, 40% of products due to such an internal link structure, the website will lose a lot of traffic for purchase-intent queries.

How to check if your website has this problem?

To verify that this problem does not affect your website, check the indexing report in Google Search Console. If you see that many pages are not indexed and are not, for example, 404s, but are physically live addresses, you probably have a crawl budget problem. What to do?

1. Check whether you are indexing unnecessary items, such as URL versions with different sorting or filtering. If there are filters in the index, it is worth considering whether they can actually respond to user queries, or whether there are too many unnecessary combinations that waste crawl budget.
2. Check the so-called crawl depth, i.e., how many clicks it takes from the home page to get to the products. If, for example, they are on pages 4, 5, or 23 of the pagination, it is a sign that they are too far away. For categories with so many products that there are a dozen or more pagination pages, it is better to break them down into subcategories.
3. Sitemap optimization. Dividing the sitemap into smaller packages, e.g., 10,000 URLs for large websites, makes it easier to plan what to index and what not to, and why. This also makes it easier for Google bots to reach the right pages. If you decide to use this solution, remember to submit each sitemap separately to the Google Search Console tool.

Are you linking to products that are no longer available or that generate 404 errors? This is a big mistake! This problem particularly affects blogs, where articles get a lot of traffic, so we add links to specific products to support conversions.

When does the problem arise? When we add “hard” links, i.e., we manually add links to products with graphics to the article. After some time, it may turn out that the product has already disappeared from the offer, and the link is still “hanging” and wasting potential by sending the Google bot to a worthless page. 

How to do it wisely?

The best solution is to automate such linking, e.g., directly in the CMS. With this method, all you need to do is insert a shortcode that links to a product with selected parameters. When it is no longer available, the system will automatically replace it. This way, you will not only save a lot of manual work, but also avoid mistakes that you might easily miss.

If this is not possible, a periodic scan of the website, e.g., using Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, will also work well. It is worth scanning the website for internal links pointing to 404 pages. This way, we will catch products that have been removed from the website. It will be more difficult to find active products (i.e., those with a 200 code) that are marked as unavailable. In this scenario, use the Custom Search function in Screaming Frog and add a message about the products’ unavailability. The result will be a list of unavailable products, and from there it is a short step to checking where the internal links lead to them.

If you want your website to perform well in terms of SEO, first check that you are not making these mistakes:

1. A website that loads too slowly, specifically, has poor results for Core Web Vitals parameters.
2. Inadequate crawl budget management. If you index pages that are not valuable from an SEO perspective and have an insufficient website structure, you may lose valuable traffic.
3. Internal linking to products that the customer cannot buy anyway. Remember that you can easily protect yourself from such a situation.

If you need help verifying or fixing any of these errors, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!

Sources:

https://nitropack.io/blog/post/how-page-speed-affects-conversion