Social media has changed the way we communicate. Love it or hate it — or really hate it — it does serve a purpose. For instance, we no longer have to spend hours writing dozens of holidays cards. Make an impersonal, self serving post and you’re done.
It literally saved you a weekend of time and excruitiating hand cramps.
Social media, for all it’s lazy hobknobbing, also gave us another gem of human evolution: Doom-scrolling.
Now we can paralyze ourselves in fear and completely sabotage our physiology, one quick swipe at a time. Oh, the wonders! In fact, in the year 2000, the average attention span of a human was 12 seconds. By 2015, it was down to 8.25 seconds. The average goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds. Let that sink in.
“But Eric, you’re a digital marketer, aren’t you part of the problem?!”
How dare you. I’d tell you to leave my site immediately, but I need the web traffic.
So what do we do?
I can’t fix all of the problems, but I can help you with your website. One thing is certain: whether it’s tiktok or your website — people on phones have less patience.
Despite being 60%+ of your traffic, folks on phones visit 2.6 pages per visit versus 3.4 on a desktop. In addition, people on mobile have a 6.8% higher bounce rate than desktop users.
So they visit less pages and leave more often.
What could possibly cause this? Well, how about this: web pages on mobile take an average of 71% longer to load than on desktop. Some of the reasons for this are out of our hands — phones have slower processors and memory, and rely more heavily on inconsistent data connections.
Now the good news: we can control some of these factors.
1.) Page weight
If a page takes longer than three seconds to load 53% of people will leave on mobile. Yikes, even goldfish wait at least 4 seconds to leave your site.
2.) Say what you want someone to hear — quickly
Ten years ago, every client wanted a carousel. They wanted to WOW visitors with multiple news stories, blogs and services to sell. Now? Carousels are completely passé and your site’s single purpose is to communicate quickly and clearly. What do you want them to do on your site and how quickly can we do it?
3.) Mobile first, but lean into what works there
Many mobile-friendly sites just stack all of the content in a mobile friendly way. There isn’t a lot of thought for the form factor. You can position your website differently when served on mobile. Ok, Mr. 2015, keep your beloved carousel — on desktop — but let’s show something more appropriate on mobile that will load faster. Optimize your code, stop using uncompressed JPGs everywhere. Test on mobile knowing your audience is a goldfish.
More good news: Your small business isn’t alone. Enormous companies make these same mistakes, too. They build new sites on old infrastructure — or worse, on old sites. They add content and images without any concern for page weight. It’s common — and easy to fix — especially if it becomes part of your digital-marketing philosophy and workflow.
I can help! If you’d like to talk about your site’s performance — or build a new website — I’m happy to have a free consult. Text me: 518-229-3364 anytime.
You can also use our old fashioned contact form to drop me a line.