Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

I am your host, Arlen Robinson. And today we have a very special guest, Araks Nalbandyan is the marketing director at 10Web. 10Web is an Automated WordPress Platform that simplifies website hosting and building so that everyone can build aesthetic and fully functional websites within just a few minutes. In this spirit, 10Web channels the power of automation to provide automated website hosting, AI-assisted website building, automated 1-click migration, automatic 90+ PageSpeed optimization, and much more.

Welcome to the podcast Araks.

I am. Thank you for having me as a guest today. Happy to be here. No problem. And thank you for joining me. I really appreciate it. And I’m really excited to kind of dig deep. We’re talking about a topic today that I haven’t really talked about in quite a little while. And we’re going to be talking about conversion rate optimization and specifically why page speed is so important with regards to improving your overall conversion rate optimization. So we’re going to be digging deep into that.

But before we get into that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today.

STARER is so basically I’ve been in the marketing for about like eight years now and I’ve started to complete the financial sector of the, like, marketing. But then I switched to working for different agencies, web agencies, marketing agencies. And actually I worked on marketing campaigns for e-commerce businesses for about five years, I think for all around the world, mainly in U.S., Australia, UK, Canada. And basically when there was a chance to go, I wanted to work on a platform, on a product, rather than just on different like companies at the same time.

So I can concentrate and put all of my knowledge into it that Teva was a perfect choice because it was a WordPress platform. I was very familiar and with WordPress and loved working with WordPress. Also, the target audience was like agencies and freelancers. So I knew personally from the inside what are the needs of the customers. So it was a perfect choice. And I moved to Tagab and that was the journey.

OK, great. Well, thank you for sharing that. And you definitely made the right move with regards to going the route, working within Web. And I’m kind of anticipating where WordPress hosting is going and WordPress in general. I don’t know what this current state is right now, but I think it’s outstanding. The amount of sites that are on the WordPress platform is really unbelievable and it’s still steadily growing to this day. It’s about thirty or forty six percent of all the websites worldwide that are what I said.

For example, if we take Joomla, for example, if I’m not mistaken, he has only one or two percent or something like that. So this is huge.

Yeah, definitely huge WordPress. It’s just a monster in the industry. Yeah. It’s like I said, definitely here to stay. But, you know, as I mentioned at the beginning, of course, today we’re going to be talking about and kind of digging deep into conversion rate optimization. But what we want to do is really look at it from the perspective of page speed. And so really, why is website page speed so important when a company or specifically an e-commerce business is looking to do a conversion rate optimization?

Basically, we take a look like what’s going on in the world, like everyone is shopping online and we get like decreasing the attention span a lot. And people like to have the page to load in two seconds or less. And if the page loads like a longer, they can now bounce like four to seven percent of people bounce. And especially in the e-commerce, even once they can delay, it can be very huge for the company. If we take, for example, an e-commerce site that makes like one hundred thousand dollars per day, once they can do, they can potentially cost them like two to 2.5 million dollar loss.

That one. So it’s huge if we, for example, compare with the Amazon, the biggest e-commerce, we can say once they could play there can cost them like one point six or two billion dollars per year. So now huge numbers. So that’s why e-commerce businesses should focus on very fast, very quick website and also search rankings. So it’s very important as well, because your speed affects how users interact with your website and that that affects your search rankings, which can be one of the main sources of the e-commerce like traffic.

Yeah, that is very true.

Part of the kind of the ranking criteria or the algorithm of Google is definitely looking at their speed and they always are stressing the speed. They’re also stressed the mobile page optimization as well. And those are very critical things for sure. Those are some amazing stats that you share with regards to just a website, let’s say on the level, like you mentioned, of Amazon with a one second delay. If they’re slower by just one second, that’s translating to millions of dollars lost.

I mean, what really is effective when the state slows down? I mean, you think about one second. I mean, that’s not really much. But is it because of the user’s attention span or the fact that somebody has to wait a little bit longer? What is it what really is driving that loss of revenue with the one second speed slowdown?

I think it’s like how life is now. People are used to get everything very quickly and they get annoyed when something gets delayed even for a second. So the bounce rate increases drastically when you are quite like a lull. So you need to keep a page loading like a half second in one second, because even once they can have that effect on a user, that can bounce first. The thing is that the user balances and the second thing, even if the user stays, they get annoyed.

So imagine the first interaction with your business is an annoyance. It’s less likely that they will come back. So you need to keep that in mind as well. A lot of people and the ones that stay part of them are annoyed with your business, which no one wants that.

Yeah, that is definitely so true that I think what it is these days, everybody is just so used to getting things immediate and not really waiting. A lot of it also has to do with just because generally these days, people’s connection speed and the download speeds that people actually have access to, whether it be their mobile Internet service provider or whether it be their cable service that they have at their home. I mean, the speeds that you get are unbelievable these days.

I mean, I’m a I’m a data maybe dating myself, but I’m a dinosaur in this industry have been around, you know, over 20 years now. And so I remember the days of dial up Internet service and some of our listeners don’t even know what that is. But that was when the only Internet access you got was via a hard wired phone line connected to a modem. I do recall that as well.

So I guess we’re both in the same boat. And so, as you know, I mean, the speeds from that compared to what we have now is unbelievable. I mean, I think we weren’t even getting a megabyte per second, we think. I mean, we were less than that, I think, at that time. And so when you think about where we are today in my home here I’m in or the Orlando, Florida area, Internet service is pretty good here.

I’m getting four hundred megabytes per second download that. I mean, that’s in my home. And that would have been unheard of back in the day. And so when you have speeds like that, all of these hosting companies, all of these service providers, they kind of set a level where they set a precedent. And so we get speeds like that. And people are so used to getting the things so quickly, they those little delays are noticeable.

Like you said, people want it when they get in. And any second delay is going to cause some annoyance and aggravation and cause them to step away.

Now, for the e-commerce businesses that are listening or people that are the marketing teams of e-commerce websites and they’re looking at how to address this, really, what are the first things that they need to do to improve the Web page load speed?

Well, it’s very unique to each website. First thing you need to check what’s wrong with your Web site so you can go to Google pasted or like different other tools that can provide you like a sports like Gitti Matrix. And they do provide you with your page, with your allotted time and also give you suggestions what you can do. You can go over everything and see what’s the reason for the delay of your website and start working on it. But to generalize, some things can.

Having a great costing for your website, having caching for your website, image optimization kicks in Minify and compressed. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Files sometimes you need like to enable lazy loads for images or videos so they can be different things. But basically, the first thing you’ll need to go to the tools, check your score and see their suggestions and go over that.

Now, let’s say, you know, business has gone ahead and done all of that and they’ve improved what they can with regards to their hosting platform, image optimization and things like that. When does it come to a point where, based on doing the analysis of the speed, let’s say they’ve done the change, where does it come to the point where you’ve only done so much that you can do? But maybe there’s a overall problem with the website structure.

Where does it come to the point where a business would just have to do a whole redesign of their website in order to get the best and most optimal effect?

Basically, if you go through all the points that, for example, Google pasted inside mentions that you need to improve and you go through it and intuitive and still your score is low, you need to take a deeper look at the code of their website and see how it works, because there did an update about, like I think it was during the summer, they did an update says that the of the website affects a lot on your page. So if you’ve gone through all the steps that Page put inside says the gesture is still the the part of your website is low.

You need to take a deeper look at your website and maybe you’ll need to rewrite that code.

That makes sense, because I know a lot of times with sites these days, I mean, a lot of times businesses will kind of typically hold on to the same design or the same structure of a site for years upon years, because especially if it’s a large e-commerce business, it’s a quite a hefty task to redesign things. And so a lot of times you’re going to be just making continuous tweaks and changes over time. But you’re sticking with that same code base.

But that makes sense how over the years things can become outdated. Different code styles and recommendations definitely change best practices that really change over the years. So I can see how that makes sense that you want you kind of reach the point where you’ve done everything you can. You’re still not seeing there’s optimal speeds and you just going to have to look at the code and either do a redesign or structured things differently.

It’s like very interesting that speed is a very, very important for ecommerce businesses. But at the same time, it’s quite a hard task and it takes quite a lot of time for developers to work on it.

Yeah, definitely. For sure. It’s definitely quite a project, but it’s something that will be worthwhile, as we saw. Now, speaking of being worthwhile, like what are the type of stats that you’ve seen with regards to conversion rate optimization when a site speed is actually improved? Like I mean, looking at just your average e-commerce business, what stats improvements have you seen?

Yeah, basically the conversion rate, if you’re a website like works loads of one second slower, you can lose like seven percent of conversion rate, for example, of on this case study that Wal-Mart did. They just improved and decreased the ones they couldn’t. And they talk about longer than fifty thousand one hundred thousand dollars more in you need a month. Wal-Mart is a huge company and we know that. But it’s a huge change for just one second, decreasing the load time.

And there are a lot of like you can find a lot of case that is like Walmart did and it really affects your conversion rate a lot.

That is really huge. One second translating to seven percent difference in that conversion rate. It really is a huge thing. So it’s definitely I think it really goes hand in hand with it. A lot of times when businesses are thinking of conversion rate optimization, I think generally, at least in my experience and from the people, the guests that I’ve had on the podcast, we’ve been looking at conversion rate optimization. We’ve been looking more at it from the angle of improving what happens when that user comes to the site, improving their overall experience and getting them to convert easily, more easily by changing the structure of the website, by changing the messaging times and all of that.

Yeah, so that’s what you think of a lot of times you don’t think about the page speed.

Yeah, of course, all that things are important, like the user experience of the website, the actual description of the products and the reviews. That’s all very important. But before all that. You need to make sure more users end up on your page and start reading what we can there experience and your website as we prepare to wrap things up.

What are some tools and resources that are typically required to improve page load speed and conversion and improve their conversion rates?

Basically, we talk about, for example, WordPress. I think we all know that there are a lot of plug ins that you can use to like, I guess, as files or just optimize different images. But still, you’ll have to do a lot of mental work. Actually, I would suggest to check our own speed optimization that that provides if we do have 14 day free trial. So you can just check it out during the trial. You can just with one click bait and optimized copy of your website on Tambellup.

And we have automated everything. So all of the steps that is required for optimizing page are done with just one click. So a couple of minutes you’ll get an optimized website and you can check the score and compare them and then just experience how your website works.

Thank you for sharing those resources and actually throw another question in there that I think our listeners may be interested in and kind of hear your answer on these days. There’s a lot of businesses that are on these kind of turnkey web e-commerce shopping cart solutions or packages or platforms, rather like the shopper Fi’s the Wick’s platforms, the big e-commerce, Squarespace, you name it. There’s a ton of them these days. You know, a lot of businesses go that route because they’re easy to get set up, easy to manage.

That is kind of makes sense. They don’t have to worry about getting a developer to do a whole custom site. And a lot of these platforms have preexisting templates that you can go through and use their builder to build. My question is with these platforms, since for the majority of the platforms, like I said, they’re based on kind of a template system that these companies have already designed and they structured and it’s hosted on their platforms. They have servers all over that are host to these platforms when it comes to the load speed with them.

Are you kind of constrained by their design, their whole server platform, or are there any options for you to improve your load speed when you’re on any of these platforms?

You mean you can’t have optimized the next page, other platforms? Yeah.

So if you’re on like the Shopify or Wiggs or Squarespace, what can you do? Well, basically, in that case, you’ll need to move your website with that, recreating your website. We have launched recently our website, Ildar, where you can just past the URL website and you can recreate the exact steps that you may need to tweak some things, but we go for, like a Dragoljub editor with it. So you’ll need your website with our eye builder and to be able to move your website for weeks out from five to 10 years and get that optimized part as well.

So basically, as far as any things that you’re looking can do on those platforms, you’re saying there’s not a lot that you can do other than switch platforms, like if you’ve gone through all of your best practices with regards to image size and things like that, and you’re using one of their kind of predesigned templates. And let’s say you don’t really have too many other fancy plug ins or anything at all there. And let’s say you’re still getting slow speeds at point.

There’s not too many options. Of course, you can complain to the company.

I know, but other than that, you can hire a developer, you can complain to the company. If nothing works, you can try our website builder for that.

That makes sense. Yes, that is one downside to it. But I think a lot of those types of companies do understand that that is a concern for people. So I know on the back end, teams are steadily doing whatever they can to kind of improve the server speed and the load times and things. But again, they’ve got hundreds of thousands and some of those platforms and millions and billions of sites that they’re juggling between different servers. So it’s a tough task.

I think you have to decide what’s best for your business. And if it makes sense to jump ship, if you think you’re going to get better performance going somewhere else. So, yeah, that’s great. And thank you for for sharing that. Well, it’s been awesome talking to you, Araks, and I definitely appreciate you coming on the e-commerce marketing podcast and sharing how page loads speed really affects conversion rate optimization. Because, again, like I said, when people hear.

IT optimization and S.R.O. and a lot of times don’t think about pithos, but when it comes to that. So it’s good to hear your insight on that. And lastly, what I like to always do is switch gears with my final closing question just so our audience can get to know you a little bit better. What is one fun fact that you think our audience would be interested to know about you?

I was just talking with a friend about it and it was very funny because in my work life we try to automate everything and we are in automation platform and in my day to day life, I try to automate everything in my life as well, like reminders, the utility payments, everything is automated. So I don’t have to think about it. But there’s one thing that might on my daily like specific cause I need to have like a pen and a planner to have all my daily tasks and go through it and just cross the ones that I’ve already done.

I don’t know what it is, but I do have my task and project management tools. I have to have it in like with a pen, write it on the planner. I think I just can concentrate better when I do that. So that’s the only thing that I’m not automating.

Your old school. You sound like me because I know a lot of times I use all of these CRM tools and task management tools. That’s great for organizing your day in your day to day tasks. But I know for me, when I go to events and conferences, I haven’t gotten to the point where I can take notes on like my iPad or another digital device like that. I’m still old school with that. I’m just pen and paper. This is something about it.

It’s just I don’t know. It just seems easier for me to just jot something down rather than to keep it into an iPad or a device like that. Yeah, I definitely hear where you’re coming from on that.

And you mentioned the conferences going to the conferences that I hope we will all soon be able to go to the conferences like in real life. Definitely.

For all those listening, we are recording this December twenty fourth, twenty twenty with Christmas Eve actually of the year, twenty, twenty and still in the midst of this global pandemic. And so there hasn’t really been any conferences since March as far as I know. And it’s face to face. Any large conferences. Yeah. We’re all excited to get to the New Year and hopefully get beyond this and get back to the face to face conferences and we’ll. Araks.

Well, thank you for sharing that. I appreciate you sharing that. And of course, I’m glad that you came on. And I know our listeners got a lot out of a discussion. I know I did as well. But lastly, before we let you go of any of our listeners, want to get a hold of you and pick your brain a little bit more about speed optimization, conversion, rate optimization or anything e-commerce marketing related, what is the best way for them to get in contact with you?

There’s that.

I want to say thank you. It was a really great talking to you today. If anyone would like to contact me, I’m almost always online on LinkedIn so you can reach out there with our one in just my name and the last name. So you can always contact me there and we can chat. OK, great.

Well, definitely hope our listeners take advantage of that and get in touch with you. And thank you again for joining us today on the E Commerce Marketing podcast.

Thank you, Tim. Thank you for listening to the E Commerce marketing podcast.

Podcast Guest Info

Araks Nalbandyan
Marketing director at 10Web