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Having web pages that have landing pages which load too slowly do not only hurt your conversion rates but they are to be penalised by Google. People are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, Google explained in their recent Inside Adwords blog. Due to this, Google will be giving websites with slow loading landing pages a lower Quality Score and in turn, a higher minimum bid price in an effort to improve user experience. A landing page could also be referred to as a destination page, the destination URL or a target URL and is the web page that a consumer arrives at once a link is clicked. Google employees are more regularly visiting landing pages in an attempt to determine relevance and quality. The main points they consider here is, the number of links on the page, how those links are used and how easy it is to navigate around the website. It is renowned that fast-loading pages improve the users' experience, in turn enhancing your company image. According to research by 1&1 Internet, slow-loading websites account for the biggest amount of complaints from UK web users. The average Ireland internet user wastes 2.5 days per year waiting for slow websites to load. The research found that 52% of participants found these slow loading websites elicit a negative response about the company.

Now is the ideal time to revaluate your landing page and combine this with an SEO report and update to ensure that your website is having the best chance of being seen by your target audience. This recent news by Google also reinforces the importance of having the correct informative content on a website that is related to your keywords. The higher the quality of your landing page, the higher quality scores you can receive from Google. I provide the subsequent practical advice that if followed, can greatly improve the speed of your website loading pages. 1) Design- An extravagant website design, using flash animation, sound and large images will significantly slow your pages loading time. The most successful sites are often the most simplistic like www.wikepedia.org for example. This is not to say that the website should be boring or dull. A good web design will incorporate the right amount of images to communicate your brand or message whilst optimising the performance for the user. Avoiding the use of flash will improve the speed of the site and will also improve your search engine performance. 2) Content In some cases you will need to use larger images, sound or
animation on your pages. Here it is important to optimise the content to reduce its size. Often image formats can be changed which drastically reduce their size. Your images can often be resized by removing unnecessary borders or blank spaces. It is strongly advised to not load sound or animation directly on your pages, instead ask users to download or launch in a new browser. 3) Hosting - Choosing the right hosting package will also make an impact on your site performance. The speed of the server connection to the Internet, the number of lines and the number of websites on a server determine the loading speed. Here you will need to investigate the configuration of the hosting services an easy place to do this is at www.hostfinder.co.uk.

Learn more about this author, Vicky Kenrick.
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