Website Problems and Solutions

October 12, 2021

2021 Update: Website Load Speed Report

WHY IS LOAD SPEED IMPORTANT

Your website is undergoing a metamorphosis without you even knowing it. Speed has become king, even over content. Here are some basic facts that can effect your sites performance in 2021.

PERFORMANCE POINTS

53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
A 2-second delay in load time resulted in abandonment rates of up to 87%.
40 percent of consumers will wait no more than three seconds for a web page to render before abandoning the site
Google itself aims for under half-a-second load time
A slow site can negative effect your Google Ranking.
People would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load and formed a “negative perception” of a company with a badly put-together site or would tell their family and friends about their experiences.
Two thirds of consumers (67%) cite slow loading times as the main reason they would abandon an online purchase.
47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.

STUDIES OF PAGE LOAD TIMES

Human viewers have expectations and no understanding that there is a difference between mobile devices and a wired desktop delivery. As such, sites need to be coded to reflect the difference in potential bandwidth, assuming the lowest common mobile delivery of 3G.

Page Time Load goes from 1s to 3s : bounce probability increases 32%.
Page Time Load goes from 1s to 5s : bounce probability increases 90%.
Page Time Load goes from 1s to 6s : bounce probability increases 106%.
Page Time Load goes from 1s to 10 : bounce probability increases 123%.
The average page load time is 3.21s

From Webanalyzer.io

LOADING VS BOUNCE VS EXIT

When discussing page loading speed vs bounce rates vs exit, the results are very similar, a human viewer leaves a website. The cause is what need to be determined.

For example:

If a person lands on page 1 of your site and hits their browser’s back button to the referring page, that’s a bounce. But is the cause because of content or loading?
If a person lands on page 1, go to page 2, and then quit their browser or jump to another site, that’s considered an exit. Because they clicked to another page from page 1, that can not be considered a bounce. Neither can page 2 since that’s not the first page the person landed on.

Behavior #1 is what is to be determined. Simplest way to determine is, decrease the load speed to under 3s. If the bounce rate still continues, then you have a content /iUx issue.

HOW TO IMPROVE LOADING SPEED

Loading speed is a mix set of factors.

Decrease the number of photos and images on a page.
Carousels while visually beautiful, they also require that each image load into memory before the page becomes functional to the viewer. Be careful of the number of images shown.
If using a CMS, like WordPress, reduce the number of plugins/extensions.
Every plugin/extension installed into your site, will be loaded on every single page of your site. The more plugins, the more to load, the slower the site.
Upgrade your hosting.
Cheap hosting is cheap because you are sharing your hosting space with thousands of other websites. One server can only respond so fast with thousands of site and thus hundreds of users at the same time. Consider upgrading to a dedicated server, where your site is the only site that responds including a dedicated IP address.
Make sure your pages reference only local scripts.
Javascript/JQuery give the power of interactivity to your page. They are a tremendous tool. BUT, make sure the code resides on your domain vs calling a public script from a 3rd party location. Not only is the 3rd party location a security risk, as it can be changed without your permission at any time, but that server speed become a factor in your own page loading time.
Use only local images.
There is a trend to display images that are located on another domain, such as google drive. That IP/domain address must be resolved and the data transfer completed before your page becomes usable. Further, using other domain images, may cause a warning notice to your viewers as a security risk – it is a classic scam technique. That risk is the same for your site, as the photos can be changed, removed or moved without notice. Loading from a different domain, really does not increase speed as the browser only loads a certain number of assets concurrently no matter where they are coming from and each reference has to be resolved before loading can begin.
Limit 3rd party external services. If you have a lot of external services, you need to load all of them and wait for information from them on each page load. The more calls you have, the more you wait, the higher the load on your own server and the higher chance you have of bumping into the second issue.

HOW EXTERNAL REFERENCES CAUSE PROBLEMS

External services typically bring with them two problems. One is brought about by sheer volume, the other has to do with waiting until they load.

If you have a lot of external services, you need to load all of them and wait for information from them on each page load. The more calls you have, the more you wait, the higher the load on your own server and the higher chance you have of bumping into the second issue.
In some cases, the page load will wait until the data transfer is completed between your site and the external service. If the service is called in the header and there is a service interruption your page will simply refuse to load.

Some of the commonly used 3rd party services are:

2 Google AdSense Ads
Facebook Like box
Instagram Widget
Disqus comments
Facebook conversion tracking pixel
Google Analytics

Of course, there are things that can be done to speed things up, however in most cases, the sheer volume of websites using those same services, is one of the biggest issues that you will have to deal with when debugging 3rd party performance issues.

Debbie Kurth

CEO & Technical Director of Multimedia Designs, LLC, System Designer, Developer, Producer with 15+ years in the internet design and development space and 25+ years in the Software Development for the entertainment industry. Winner of the prestigious International Themed Entertainment Association award for interactive design. She holds a degree in Computer Engineering & Mathematics from California State University, Long Beach.

MultiMedia Designs, LLC
Digital Design & Technology Company
Office: +1.818.272.0819
Email: multimediadesignsllc@gmail.com

HONEST ANSWERS – GREAT PRICES

October 11, 2021

What Exactly is Bot Traffic?

Website Problems and Solutions

Bot traffic is defined as any machine driven, non-human traffic that connects to your website or app. Often “bots” are associated with all things negative, as they tend to be irritating due to their irrelevance in terms of user engagement.

However, bots aren’t necessarily good or bad. It all depends on their purpose. Some bots are designed to be useful to users. Others can be rather malignant, such as the ones designed for data scraping, launching denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, malware installation or other unauthorized web crawling.

What makes these bots such a nuisance is that they can mess with your website analytics and they typically generate click-fraud. A action which defrauds services like Google AdSense, Google Ad Manager, and the programmatic advertising world.

What Are The Different Types of Bot Traffic?

Bots make up over 40-45% of all website traffic. A machine is touching your site, instead of the desired human being. If that’s not bad enough, there are different types you need to watch out for — six different types to be specific:

1. Click bots
Click bots are the key tool used by spammers. These bots are considered the greatest threat posed to web publishers, especially those following the pay-per-click (PPC) model for their advertisements.

2. Download bots
Download bots are ban of true marketing data analytics., especially when it comes to your user engagement data. They generate fake download count. If you are offering free products or services via a form, these bots will mess up your conversion rate data.

3. Spam bots
The most common of all bots. These bots like mess with you website, by attempting to place ads in your comment fields, steal emails, and attempt to do website redirects, This can generate all sorts of negative SEO against you and your competitors. It is the fake news of the bot world.

4. Spy Bots
These bots only goal is to quietly steal information. They like to steal semi-personal information like email addresses from websites and other communicative channels, which makes them incredibly dangerous.

5. Scraper Bots
Scraper bots are massively malicious. They’re created by third-party scrapers, usually hired by your very own competitors with the intention of stealing your content, product catalogs, and even prices. Only to be repurposed and published somewhere else — without your permission, of course.

6. Imposter Bots
Impostor bots act like they’re authentic visitors to bypass any security measures you have in place. These bots are most responsible for the DDoS attacks, and they really like to install spyware on your site, or position themselves as fake search engines.

Bots are a never-ending nuisance that will eventually destroy your website if you don’t take the proper measures to spot and prevent them. Between the different types of bots you’ll have to deal with, and the fact that they’re only getting smarter, you could have a lot of work ahead of you.

Debbie Kurth

MultiMedia Designs, LLC
Digital Design & Technology Company
Office: +1.818.272.0819
Email: multimediadesignsllc@gmail.com

HONEST ANSWERS – GREAT PRICES

October 11, 2021

What Is A Website Bounce Rate?

Website Problems and Solutions

A site’s bounce rate is a key piece of information it tells you how well people are or not engaging with a webpage’s content or user experience. A major league tool, that most of the internet websites use to determine bounce rates is called Google Analytics .

The frustrating part about these raw numbers is that it also can be a deceiving piece of information. Why deceiving, because while analytics log an access to your site, you have to figure out who area real people and who are bots cruising the web. So how do you find out what is the true rate? Let’s define first what a bounce rate is.

WHAT IS A BOUNCE RATE?

Bounce rate is calculated when a human or bot, visits a single page on your website and does nothing on the page before leaving the same page. The goal of any site, is to interest a human into performing another action such as buying something, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.

WHAT IS BOT TRAFFIC?

Bot traffic is defined as any non-human traffic that connects to your website or app. Often “bots” are associated with all things negative, as they tend to be irritating due to their irrelevance in terms of user engagement.

What Is a Good Bounce Rate?

To define what a good bounce rate is, you need to understand the difference between a high bounce rate and a low bounce rate. A high bounce rate means that a visitor’s overall session duration is short; they visit a page on your site and leave. A low bounce rate means that visitors are spending time on a page and clicking on available links.

A high bounce rate means that a visitor’s overall session duration is short

A low bounce rate means that visitors are spending time on a page and clicking on available links.

Another way to think about this is to think about a site’s structure. Let’s consider an ecommerce site. The homepage might have the highest bounce rate out of any page, for instance, because you want your visitors to stay on landing pages where they can make a purchase, like a product page.

So, what is a good bounce rate?

If you have done the work of protecting against Bots hitting your site, a bounce rate of 60% to 70% is on the high side. Some work may be necessary to drop this, in the Uix, loading speed, hosting response or similar website performance issues.

Average bounce rates range in the 41% to 55%, where an optimal bounce rate would be in the 26% to 40% range.

These are general ranges of evaluation and highly dependent on the popularity your site has with the bots.

Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate

When discussing bounce rates, another term that frequently comes up is the exit rate. The difference between a bounce rate and an exit rate is sometimes not well understood since the two are rather similar.

If the bounce rate is the number of single-engagement sessions a webpage has, the exit rate is the number of people departing a specific page, even if they didn’t originally land on it.

As an example:
If a person lands on page 1 of your site and hits their browser’s back button to the referring page, that’s a bounce. But if they land on page 1, go to page 2, and then quit their browser or jump to another site, that’s considered an exit. Because they clicked to another page from page 1, that can not be considered a bounce. Neither can page 2 since that’s not the first page the person landed on.

In terms of analysis, a bounce may indicate a lack of interest in a site, but a high exit rate could indicate you’re having problems with conversion rate optimization (CRO).

How to Lower Bounce Rates

If you want to lower your bounce rate, you should consider what can negatively impact your bounce rate, including:

Slow page loading speed
Pop-ups over the primary page
Unnecessary plug-ins loading the page.
Poor usability via the Uix
Title tags and meta descriptions that aren’t properly optimized
Technical errors
Missing Pages
No SSL
Dull content
Pages that aren’t mobile or tablet friendly aka responsive.
Improperly implemented Google Analytics setup

WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO?

Optimize for Mobile/Tablet
There is a rising number of people using their smart phones as their primary internet viewing device. Having a good design, that is responsive is essential.

Make your page easy to read
It is an international market. While English may be the primary language of the net, the viewers may not be as versed. It is recommended by Yoast, the leading SEO plugin/extension provider, that you follow the Flesch reading ease score. This may be frustrating to some business owners, as the read level is the equivalent of a 4th grade education.

Target High-Value Traffic Keywords
A keyword isn’t just a keyword. Some have higher values than others. These keywords can vary according to the part of the sales funnel you’re sitting in — driving traffic and establishing authority or seeking to convert buyers whose interest you have hooked. If you choose a keyword that drives traffic to your site, you must deliver on its promise with the right content

Use SEO
Effective competitive research, keyword research, link building, rank tracking, or on-page and technical SEO, are the solutions you need. The results will provide new ideas for content, backlinks, strategy, UX, and much more. By implementing them, you can change higher bounce rates into jumps for joy as you get more successful visitor engagement.

Debbie Kurth

August 6, 2020

Social Media Mistakes All Small Business Owners Should be Aware Of

Website Problems and Solutions

Social media can be a small-business owner’s gold mine–or the worst enemy. These mistakes can leave your business with some SERIOUS problems.

Social media is a key component of any small business’ marketing efforts. To get know. To get seen. To find new customers. When done well, a social strategy helps your business connect directly with customers, with the potential of creating a good will among others.

As in anything on the internet, for all the power and potential of social media, there are pitfalls as well. The internet can look like a cavalier place when it comes to copyright rules, but there are plenty of no-nos that you need to follow if you want to stay out of legal trouble. To make matters worse, now attorney’s have built their own system prowling the internet, looking for images that match their clients and then send out demand letters that can run into the the thousands of dollars for a single photo or graphic.

So how do you avoid this problem. Here are 7 of the most common errors I have seen:

1. Using photos without permission

At Multimedia Designs, I have worked with a LOT of small business owners who only recently stared using sites such as Instagram and google to find graphics. The dangers of just downloading and using verses asking for permission.

Permissions work differently for businesses on the internet than individuals, however. Any time you use a photo on social media, you must make sure that you have permission from the owner of the image.

Most business will be happy to allow you to use their photos as long as you ask politely and give them some kind of credit or link. Some may ask you for a license fee in exchange, which you can work out on a case-by-case basis. The same holds true for individuals as well–even if you took the photo yourself, you have to make sure that the person photographed is okay with you using their likeness. This is especially true, with professional photos, where models may have been used and royalties are legally required for use of their likeness.

2. Not getting reviewers permission

A former customer gives you a awesome review. Of course you want to use it. But there is a gotcha. IF they review your brand on YOUR social media page, with the exception of medical practices, you are good to go to use it. If they email you with a happy report AND your website has a privacy policy that explains that review sent in may be used for publicity…you are also good to go. That is where the permissions stop.

Just because someone mentioned your brand or took a great photo of your product doesn’t mean you’re allowed to repost their content, though, since it’s their intellectual property.

Before you “repost” that awesome pic of your product on Instagram, post a quick reply and thank the original poster for the praise. Then ask if they’re okay with the company re-using their original post. Once you’ve gotten the go-ahead, be sure to clearly label that the photo and accompanying text came from the original user, and tag them in your post.

3. Using logos or other copyrighted materials

If you’ve found the perfect inspiration for your logo, and it’s already in use by another company, you’re going to have to keep looking.

It doesn’t matter if the name or logo is for a company in a different country–their intellectual property claim still holds up (so long as they’re copyrighted and patented these items). If you truly want to take inspiration from another company’s logo, work with a graphic designer who can help you pinpoint which parts of the design you like.

4. Not identifying paid influencer posts

Influencer advertising can be a great way for companies to spread their message. Influencers promote products and brands in exchange for free goods or a sum of money. They can help drive their social following to your brand’s social channels, or to your website.

Make sure that your influencers always mark that their post is sponsored by your company, or that they received free products in exchange. Companies are just as liable to punitive actions as the individuals doing the posting.

5. Talking Negative about your competitors

It’s tempting for brands to look at industry-leading companies’ social media handles and try to emulate their tactics. Some brands like to live on the edge by replying to comments with sarcastic remarks, or jabs at their competitors, but they also have a team of lawyers to protect them.

The best rule of thumb for social media is to never post something you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying out loud. If you would never consider walking into your competitors’ shop and saying something to the owner, I say don’t post it on the internet.

6. Not posting contest terms and conditions

Contest are a wonderful way to get attentions. Give some product away in the hopes of gaining more public exposure. But giveaways and contest on social media still have to follow the same rules and regulations as their offline counterparts. Thus it is extremely important that you specify the terms and conditions, clearly posted in order to participate in those contest.

7. Attacking Negative Reviews

It is tempting. A customer does not like your product or service. What do you want to do is delete it or lash back. DON’T. This is where you have to rise above the attack and in the process you turn a negative into a positive, showing how you work with customers. Respond with a positive, that you are sorry for the experience and ask them to reach out and contact you. In this way, others will release you are not going to be negative and hostile to work with.

Plus a social media page that looks “perfect”, also looks unreal.

Social media is a fantastic resource for small business. Economical and allows you to compete against the giant brands on a equal footing. But it is also too easy to make avoidable mistakes that can do more harm, destroying the pluses.

September 13, 2018

Common Website Problems and How To Fix Them

Support, Website Problems and Solutions

1. Mobile Incompatibility

This is a secret death to websites in 2018 and beyond. With the younger market becoming more and more influential, mobile is the only device many will use to see you site. It is called “responsiveness”. The ability of a website to adapt and change on hundreds of different display types, most of which are not just smaller computer screens. Computers have what is referred to as a landscape presentation, where as mobile, can be either landscape or profile.

If a site is not responsive, then the imagery and the wording is simply “cut off from the right, leaving you image and message hidden. With it, goes those interested in your product or message.

Landscape

Profile

THE FIX
Once you realize that your site is not mobile friendly, fixing it can be a challenge. Some of the classic ways to retrofit a site is to create a mobile only version of the site. This is a common solution if you site was based on HTML and not using template driven CSS base.

If your site is WordPress, Joolma or any one of the content management system, it may be necessary to implement 1,2,3 – Computer – Tablet – Smartphone, page combination. In other-words, 3 pages in one, where the content is displayed by type of device being presented on. To reduce the work, assume a “profile” display for all mobile devices.

2. Broken Links

For a user, nothing means disinterest in a site that whose links don’t work. Why not just move on to the next site that does. Broken links are common during the development of a site, especially as pages are created and trashed. Is also is extremely common, when you move from a standard ‘http:’ to a ‘https:’.

THE FIX

Hire a qualified vendor who will systematically go through you site, looking for missing links to your imagery. This is NOT the kid in the neighborhood. The job requires extreme patient and very systematic working of every single page, every single image, ever single link.

3. Long load times

Another death item that people and search engines hate. Humans have little patience with the average time to be less than 20 seconds to not only load the page, but interested the viewer. That is not much time to make an impact.

Search engines are even more picky. Google actually LOWER your ranking, based on the technology feels is a poorly implemented site! You have less than 5 seconds.

THE FIX
One or more of all these solutions, should fix your page load speed.

1. Fast Server
The simplest and most effective way to increase your load time is a fast server. This is not going to come at $9.95 a month with the economical site hosting. That is not a popular answer. Economic hosting , such as provided by godaddy and WIX, shares your site with hundreds and hundreds of other sites, all on the same server. The ability of the technology is limited in it’s response time, because it is split.

2. Shrink the Page Sizes
Another way to fix you load times is to shrink the size of the pages. Images, text, google detection code and more. There is a LOT being transmitted from a site. The large amount of data, the slower the response to completely load a page.

A) Compression Software
There are lots of compression software that will perform this acceptably. If you are WordPress based, “W3 Total Cache” is amazingly effective. Better yet, they have a free version that does the job. However be careful with the configuration. I strongly advise NOT to enable Minification. In theory, this feature reduces load time by decreasing the size and number of CSS and JS files. Compression can actually cause problems. Compressing the JavaScript coding, can inadvertently change how the code works and thus the page no longer performs as expected.

B) Technical Artist
The best and most effective way to reduce you page load time is a good technical artist. Images do not need to be saved at the highest quality. Just a quality level that will effectively display your images that looks great to the user, while cutting the actually size up to 50%.

C) Reduce the Plugins
Plugin are very cool. They add features and functionality to a website that in the past, cost thousands of dollars to implement. But they also take up time when loading a page. The myth of website development is that a plugin only runs on the page you use it on. The reality is every single plugin you install on your site will run on every single page of your site. The more plugins, the slower the response time. Keep you plugins to only what you truly need.

1. Mobile Incompatibility

This is a secret death to website in 2018 and beyond. With the younger market becoming more and more influential, mobile is the only device many will use to see you site. It is called “responsiveness”. The ability of a website to adapt and change on hundreds of different display types, most of which are not just smaller computer screens. Computers have what is referred to as a landscape presentation, where as mobile, can be either landscape or profile.

If a site is not responsive, then the imagery and the wording is simply “cut off from the right, leaving you image and message hidden. With it, goes those interested in your product or message.

Landscape

Profile

2. Broken Links

THE FIX

3. Long load times

Search engines are even more picky. Google actually LOWER your ranking, based on the technology feels is a poorly implemented site! You have less than 5 seconds.

THE FIX
One or more of all these solutions, should fix your page load speed.

Author: Debbie Kurth
Debbie is an former Walt Disney Imagineer, Equestrian, Technical Producer and the CEO of Multimedia Designs, a digital design and engineering firm in Los Angeles, CA.