A friend had two websites built. One for himself, and one for his book. Paid good money to a digital marketing firm to design, build, and create content. When I first saw it I almost cried. Stuff was flying in from the sides like it was a 1990s PowerPoint presentation. I felt like Phoebe from Friends when she found out Monica and Chandler were “doing it.”
Later, when my friend and I met for coffee, he asked what I thought about his new website. Before I answered I thought to myself, “Don’t ask a question you don’t want an honest answer to.” My response was, “If I could only change one thing about your website it would be get rid of the flying crap,” and then I explained why.
No standard device
Unlike the roaring 90s when everyone was using a PC configured with Microsoft Windows, today websites must load on many devices in many screen sizes. PCs are declining in popularity, and mobile devices are on the rise. Smart phones and tablets of various sizes, from various manufacturers, using various operating systems and your website has to load on all of them. The more complex you make a site the less likely it is to load properly across all devices and platforms.
Flying crap increases the odds your site won’t load on someone’s device. Get rid of flying crap.
Slows load time
Users don’t like websites that load slow.
- 73% of mobile internet users say they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load
Since users don’t like websites that load slow neither does Google.
We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.
Flying crap slows load time. Get rid of flying crap.
Slow internet connection
Not everyone is sitting next to a wifi enabled router connected to high speed fiber connection. Most are not. They are depending on an unreliable cell signal or overloaded wifi hotspot, that is painfully slow. Flying crap adds unnecessary code to your site, meaning more code has to be downloaded to a device before your site will load. If this is happening on a slow internet connection it means your site will be slow to load, and we already know users don’t like sites that load slow.
Flying crap slows load time. Get rid of flying crap.
Constantly be testing your website.
Device testing
When you go into Best Buy, Fry’s, or MicroCenter head over to their computers, smart phones, and tablets and start loading your website to see how it responds. When you’re in the barber shop and they have a crap PC sitting in the corner for customer use call up your website and see how it works. If you’re in a foreign country ask a local to call up your site on their usual device.
User testing
I just looked at my friend’s website. The good news is it looks like he took my one piece of advice and got rid of the flying crap.
Antique Fan by Ryan Dickey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.