Are Fancy Graphics Hurting Your Sales?

I’ve written a number of articles on how marketers can improve their online conversions. And one of the aspects that I like to hammer home in those articles is the fact that it’s vital for your website to appear professional. Put your best foot forward and create a good first impression.

Now, for some reason, a lot of people translate that into more graphics. So they try to utilize as much graphics as possible and soon their websites are so graphics-laden - they actually saw a drop in sales, despite the fact that those website now look “fancy and cool”.

Do you know why is that?

Well, here’s a snippet from Marketing Sherpa’s 2008 landing page handbook that might explain it, “As of 2007, roughly 50% of the US Internet population gets broadband and 80% of heavy users (which includes offices and your webmaster’s home) are on broadband. That still means tens of millions of Americans are not on super-high bandwidth. Plus, anyone who uses a satellite service for Internet access may only have high bandwidth part of the time.”

That means websites that are too graphic laden lost customers simply because they take too long to load. We are impatient creatures. In fact, we don’t even read things online anymore (we skim) and you expect your customers to wait for your websites to load?

So how do you design a page to load quickly? Here are some quick tips.

1. The most obvious way to reduce load time is of course to use lesser graphics. Eliminate graphics that don’t add value to your website - and I know you used graphics for the sake of using them.
2. If you absolutely need graphics, try to re-use them whenever possible. The same graphic used several times are only downloaded once and displayed wherever it’s supposed to appear, so it doesn’t bog down a website like 2 different graphics would.
3. As a rule, don’t use animated graphics. Animated graphics are really several images strung into one moving-picture so they’ll naturally take more time to load.
4. If you have a huge image, remember to predefine its size so that the browser knows of its size. There are two benefits to this: faster load time and it makes sure your graphics appears the way you want it to.
5. If you don’t know much about coding, I suggest you let somebody else do it because excessive code is one of the culprits of lengthy load time. Use css based design and separate css files rather than containing it in the main code. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you definitely need to outsource it.

Depending on your market, these optimizations by itself can dramatically boost your sales. It works especially well if you are targeting an older market. They generally use slower internet connection so they’ll be most affected by load times.