This Halloween, ensure your website’s user experience on both mobile and desktop is anything but scary. LXRMarketplace provides you with all the tools you need to help your website run fast and efficiently. This week, we’ll be highlighting the Broken Link Checker tool and the PageSpeed Insights tool.

The core of user experience consists of strong performance and speed. Consumers have higher expectations than ever regarding load time and ease of navigation on your website. You must keep you with their preference in order to maximize conversions while decreasing bounce rate.

According to data from Google, “…40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. And 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same site again.” (Source: Think With Google) A one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. (Source:  Kissmetrics)

There are certain expectations from the end user. For example, your website should load within two to four seconds. A majority of consumers will argue that a quicker load time is closely tied to brand loyalty. In order to hook in and retain a consumer on your site,you need to act and be fast.

Your website navigation is another important factor to consider. It should be easy to understand and have a nice flow, especially for new visitors. Consider this statistic:

• After reaching a company’s website via a referral site, 50% of visitors will use the navigation menu to orient themselves. (Source: KoMarketing)

A quick way to see how your navigation stacks up is to compare it with your competitors in your industry. Alternatively, you can assign that task to a new team member or intern who isn’t 100% familiar with your website layout. This will help highlight any issues that should be addressed without too much bias. If you have the budget for it, you can always use a service like UserTesting.

Let’s talk about how some of our tools can help improve the overall performance of your website.

Broken Link Checker

Don’t risk losing customers or brand loyalty by not knowing if your links are working properly on your website. Be proactive and use the Broken Link Checker tool to locate bad or broken URLs throughout your site. Plus, the tool will generate a report with a list of all the broken links, status codes, and error messages. Once you have the data, you  can correct these issues to help improve your user experience. Keep in mind that if a user is lead to a broken link (through a referral site or within your own site), it can damage your credibility online and inhibiting you from acquiring new customers.

PageSpeed Insights

We can’t emphasize this enough. Speed really does matter. Visitors are more likely to leave your website if everything doesn’t load within two to four seconds. Why should they wait, though? The SERP allows more than enough results on the front page that they can just click or tap back and choose the next link.

With the PageSpeed Insights tool, you’ll be able to calculate your website’s performance score on both desktop and mobile to get a complete analysis of every file that’s slowing down your site. The tool will also generate a list of suggestions on how to make your page load faster with easy, tangible solutions that can be implemented as soon as possible.

About LXRMarketplace

At LXR Marketplace, we want to simplify lives of small retail marketers by providing them with free and low priced web applications for improving their online marketing management efficiency, as well as campaign performance. Feel free to browse all of our tools that will benefit you and your business in some way! We intend to launch more (and always free!) online SEO and SEM tools for your small business to continue to help your website reach its fullest potential.

Find out more about our free tools today!

Even if you are on the right track, You’ll get run over if you just sit there. – Will Rogers