As part of the website optimisation, I use Google Lighthouse to test my website speed and it seems that my site is loading way too slow for people's patience. So following the Lighthouse's guidelines, I found ways to reduce my website's bounce rate from 100% down to 62.50%.
Bounce rate
It's easy to find a definition of bounce rate. But in layman's term, it's the percentage of people leaving your site after accessing one page and leaving no other interactions.
Among many reasons for a high bounce rate, a technical issue, something like your website's loading time, shouldn't be one. Because it's like you are inviting people to your house but before they get to know who you are, you have already chased them away with a locked door.
So what happened to my site?
Finding the reason
With the help of Google Lighthouse, I found out that it took people too long to see what my website is actually about, and people don't usually have that kind of patience. Although many other reviews on the Internet complain about the general loading speed of Wix, I wasn't planning to give up on it too soon. So I dig in more into Lighthouse's suggestions and worked on the issues one by one.
High-quality photos
As a Marketer with a background in advertising agencies, I was used to working with high-resolution images. So when starting out the website, I did what I used to do and upload high-quality PNG and JPEG images to the site.
Thanks to coronavirus and the whole home-sheltered/social distancing ordeals when everyone is working from home, the Internet connection that I was working with could champion even a snail. Then it dawned on me that if it takes me that long to upload an image, it couldn't improve on my visitor's side.
So I started with changing all my images into WebP format - which is a new image format developed by Google that can compress your photos down around 2/3 of its original size but still keeps the quality. And those images start showing up much faster. Not bad huh?
Wix's features
One of my kind friends who visit the website during the earlier days noticed me that all the site's elements were overlapping and falling on top of each other on his screen. So I look through Wix's features and found their Grids/Lists and Strips add-on is extremely useful to fix your website's elements onto the site.
And by adding repeating elements into a Repeater, it saves you time adding and fixing individual elements into each other. Your website loading time is also reduced.
These features are also adaptable on multiple screen types, so your website will look nicer on many different platforms as well (Which is very important during the current multi-screen life).
Website's length
It turns out that scrolling down a loooooong website gives people no reason to stick around as they have all the information they need in one scroll (bounce!). That's not to say a lengthy website takes time to load. So I decided to break down my initial site into multiple sub-sites to shorten the homepage.
Grids/Lists, Strips and Repeaters as mentioned above also help shorten the page and drive up the speed.
Video clips and plug-ins
One thing I learn from a previous website I did was that adding too many animations, third-party plug-ins and effects drives down your website's speed drastically.
Since one of my skills is video editing, I had two YouTube clips that did slow down my loading time. So I found a way to work around it by screenshotting the image of my YouTube video clips, then linking it away to its YouTube platform instead. In this maths between people leaving the site after viewing the clip and people can't even access my site due to slow loading speed, I would choose the speed for now. I will get back in the future when optimising my site.
Colours
A third of my friends who helped me review the initial set-up complained about the bright purple I used as the background of the website. After a bit of research, I found that the best colour combination for a website is still black letters on a white background. Something with a lighter tone would be nice on the eyes of people who constantly spend time in front of the screen as well. So I revise in accordance. At the end of the day, a good marketing campaign wouldn't work without an initial focus group and lots of testing along the way.
Status Quo
By the time I finished with the image optimisation, my website's bounce rate was reduced down to 62.50%. The next day I added in a few analytics apps and the bounce rate increased again to 90%, but today after the restructuring of the website, it went down to 72.73%. Not bad for a website of 1 week old right?
Learning is a lifelong journey, and as I start this website and improving it day by day, I am thrilled to add yet another skillset into my toolbox. I have always been more of a generalist and picking up new skills as my work goes is always part of the joy. What is next to learn? Tomorrow we will find out.
Thank you for reading this blog where I share about the new skills that I learn as part of my work. What do you think about my tips to improve my Wix website? Comment below! I would love to talk to you more about it!
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