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Car Analogies for Optimizing Landing Page Speed

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post detailing how landing page speed can affect your Google Adwords Quality Score.  Although Google may penalize your Quality Score for poorly performing landing pages, the truth is that visitors make all the difference for conversion.  How many times have you gone to a website to wait ages for it to load?  Sometimes it’s just not pretty, and that’s a pity because slow load times are so easy to remedy.

I’ll admit it, I’m a car guy and I have a love-hate relationship with my automobile, especially these days with the rising cost of gasoline.  However, the automobile can be used to draw perfect analogies on how to fix your landing page speed issues.

Choosing the right car

If keywords bring visitors to your site, then keywords can be thought of as the vehicle on the “superhighway”.  (Aside: When was the last time you heard that word to describe the internet?)  Choosing the right vehicle is critical in your performance because the type of vehicle will determine how much you spend for your car, and how well it performs against the competition.  Broader, less complex and generalized keywords will cost more, and there will undoubtedly be more cars in the race, so you better be able to keep up.

Sure, it’s good to have the best possible speed, but you really only have to keep up with your competitors.  Landing page speed is a measure that is relative to your market.

Shortest distance between two points

Consider your landing pages the destination on your visitors’ journey.  If you had the choice to take local streets that are slower and jammed with traffic, or take a stretch of the Autobahn, which would you choose?  The road travelled in the online world is your network infrastructure.  The type of road is dictated by your hosting solution, whether it be a shared hosting plan (mass transit), dedicated server (a taxi), or content distribution network (teleporters ala Star Trek).  Fine, that last one wasn’t a car analogy.

Losing the Load (time)

On a recent road trip from Toronto to Montreal, I was able to drive at a steady speed making only one stop.  It took just under  5 hours, and I only managed to burn about 45 litres of gasoline.  On the way back, I drove 3 friends, stopped a total of 4 times, and was bogged down with a cooler, luggage and drove portions of highway with the windows open (4 guys, you do the math).  The point is, had I lost the excess weight, skipped the needless pitstops and kept the windows closed, it wouldn’t have taken more than 6 hours to drive back.

• Images: you don’t need images on the scale of megapixels for a good quality picture.  No one should notice if you optimize images to their true size and bit depth, use GIF format for images with less colors, and JPG quality of no more than 80%.
• Video/Flash:  Truth is, flash and video should be used sparingly on landing pages, if at all.  Unfortunately, studies have shown that video does wonders for conversion rates, so make sure the video loads after sniffing for browser or network speed settings, or that it loads with javascript after the rest of the page.  Click to play is also another worthwhile option.
• Excess code:  like leaving the windows open on the highway, having excess code or using poorly written HTML/CSS in your landing page will only slow you down.

You won’t believe how many landing pages I see that utilize massive images that are shrunk down in HTML.  Images that should only be a few kilobytes in size if they were optimized end up taking forever to load because they’re fresh of the digital camera.  It’s a game I like to call, “Find the unoptimized image!”

Avoid the Car Snake

When I was growing up and we took road trips, my Dad’s favorite question was, “Do you know the difference between a snake and a ‘car snake’?”  The answer rings true today as it did more than 20 years ago.  I’ll give you a hint, it has to do with the location of the valley where the sun don’t shine.  In landing page optimization, removing or modifying slow-performing code will often solve many of your problems.  Google Analytics, for instance, should always be moved to the end of a page just before the closing body tag, because response time can get slow sometimes.

Tim ‘the Tool-man’ Taylor

There are several tools out there that can help you diagnose and rectify landing page load time issues.  One tool that can act as your site’s mechanic but without the labor charges is YSlow, a Firefox add-in by Yahoo.  For those of us out there using content management systems to drive our websites and landing pages, plugins or options are often available that can track page load times automatically, like onboard sat-nav.  For those of us more inclined to program pages ourselves, it’s as easy as including a bit of PHP script.  Keep in mind, you won’t have to necessarily use these tools on a continuous basis.

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