A Goal-Oriented Approach to Optimizing Your Website in 5 Steps

Optimizing your website for conversions is not just a strategy—it's a necessity. As you gear up for high-traffic events like Black Friday, it's crucial to ensure that your site is fast and aligned with your business goals. 

Aligning optimization efforts with goals was a topic Ellery Womack, Senior Director of Engineering at edge network company Edgio, Nick Paladino and I discussed on a recent episode of The Frictionless Experience podcast. 

Use these five tips to fine-tune your website to maximize conversions and enhance user experience, drawing insights from this conversation and other experts from The Frictionless Experience podcast:

1. Understand the Balance Between Speed vs. Experience

Ellery Womack, a digital optimization expert, emphasizes balancing site speed with user experience. "Performance, site speed, out of the context of customer experience is not what we're talking about here," he notes. 

The key is to enhance the features of your site without compromising speed. For instance, moving a recommendations menu from the top to the bottom of the page might improve load times, but consider its impact on user interaction and conversion rates.

2. Prepare for Peak Traffic

As Black Friday approaches, Ellery advises businesses to conduct mini-events simulating high-traffic scenarios. This preparation helps ensure that your infrastructure can handle the load during peak periods and avoid costly failures. 

"You can always load test and perf test things all day, but how do we schedule an event where you give people 20% off some products just to get to that Black Friday type of load?" he suggests. This proactive approach helps identify and fix potential bottlenecks before they impact your customers.

3. Embrace the Art of Incremental Improvements

Optimization is not about drastic changes but rather about incremental improvements. Womack emphasizes making small, thoughtful adjustments that enhance both performance and user experience. 

"Be more incremental and think about it more from something smaller," he advises. This could mean experimenting with the placement of elements on your page or testing different user experiences to see what resonates with your audience.

4. Learn from Past Experiences and Failures

Our discussion included cautionary tales of businesses that failed to prepare adequately for peak periods. 

Ellery recounts a story of a company that underestimated the need for additional server capacity, leading to a last-minute scramble to keep their site running. "I've seen some people who try to avoid that... and they've been bitten by it," he warns. 

The lesson is clear: thorough preparation and testing are essential to avoid costly downtime and lost sales.

5. Focus on Top-of-Funnel Optimization

Prioritize improvements at the top of the funnel, such as product detail pages (PDP) and category pages, where users often land first. Enhancing these areas can significantly impact conversion rates as they are critical touchpoints in the user journey. 

“I’ve worked with companies that want to go headless and build composable websites and they want to start optimizing with cart and checkout,” says Ellery. “I strongly advise against starting with the bottom of the funnel. Accelerating site speed at the top and making those experiences better will drive greater results from improving checkout.”

Nick agreed, pointing out:

Optimizing your site based on goals requires a thoughtful, strategic approach. 

By balancing speed with user experience, preparing for peak traffic, and making incremental improvements, you can create a website that meets and exceeds your business objectives. 

As you implement these strategies, keep your users at the heart of your efforts, ensuring a frictionless experience that drives conversions and builds loyalty.