Why it is time for a diet for your landing pages

For a long time, we have advised our clients that they need to consider a diet. This doesn’t refer to getting more exercise, eating less or counting calories. No, I am referring to their overweight landing pages, and the negative effects of page weight on conversions.

If your landing page takes more than a couple seconds to render on broadband, you are surely leaving money on the table. This is especially true if the headline and primary value proposition are slow to appear. The longer your pages take to download and render in a user’s browser, the more money you are losing. This is because people have a strong tendency to use their back buttons if a page takes too long to appear.

If you are not sure how long your landing pages take to appear, use the free website speed report to learn how fast (or slow) they are. This site (GTmetrix) will also give you some specific suggestions for speeding things up.

Most people agree that fast loading pages are a good idea, although they seldom do much about it. However, in case you missed it, Google came out and promised to penalize slow loading landing pages connected to Adwords advertisements. Google has s metric in the Adwords interface that indicates if they think your page is too slow. Slow loading pages will have a negative impact on your Quality Score and increase your minimum bids. I am curious what steps they take to determine if your page is slow, but one thing is for certain…. slow pages will ultimately cost you more money to advertise.

Will this mean an end to the 15 page long sales letters than dominate some niches? I don’t know, we will have to wait and see. These pages are frequently 250-300k and can take minutes to download completely on a slow connection. The bottom line is this. You will not only enjoy a higher conversion rate by putting your pages on a diet, you may save some money on your Adwords bill as well.