How Digital Marketing Trends Affect Web Performance And What You Can Do About It

Data and usage demands on websites are constantly growing, but most businesses rarely upgrade their infrastructure to meet them.

Many small to medium-sized business owners add increasingly complex features and material to their site without considering the impact this has on performance.

As the steady and consistent growth in the web performance market shows, there is big money to be made in the business of keeping page response times low. In fact, most people abandon a website that takes longer than 2 seconds to appear on their screen.

Luckily, advances in cloud computing mean that businesses can have it all by both keeping up with changing trends and maintaining optimal page load speed.

But what are these trends driving ageing websites to the brink? It all comes down to one thing: ever more complex content.

In this blog, I’ll discuss how businesses can both meet content demands and get ahead of their competitors by using cloud computing to free their website from bandwidth and disk space limitations.

Digital marketing is content

Online business success comes down to content. Because SEO is driven by it, it is most of what makes digital marketing work.

But what people expect from online content is constantly changing and, usually, becoming more and more complex. Where a 300 word blog post every few days used to sustain smaller businesses, we’re now expected to produce 500-4000 words of feature rich content every day.

But whether your business is on Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media hub, your goal is to use content to entice them to your website. Websites remain the centre of a business’s marketing efforts. When you spend so much time trying to funnel people there, it better be good when they make it.

Mixed media

When we say ‘content’, we’re not just talking about text. People increasingly prefer mixed media content and this trend shows no sign of slowing down.

Whether it’s graphics, video, webinars or other live events, mixed media content costs your data and bandwidth.

Sites that use free web hosts will struggle the most. Whereas, those who’ve invested in cloud hosting will notice a difference in cost, but won’t risk a gradual slowdown in performance or an increase in downtime typical of other hosting methods.

Customisation and personalisation

Adding the latest plugins to your website can be the best way to keep up with changing content demands. For example, an increasing number of AI-based plugins allow businesses to automate personalised marketing campaigns.

Personalisation is one of the most important marketing trends of 2019 and it’s near impossible to keep up without this kind of technology.

But repeatedly adding new technologies to old sites slows them down. Think about what happens to a three year old iPhone when you keep adding the latest apps.

A hefty 31% of consumers want their shopping experience to be more personalised and, according to research by SalesForce, 62% expect the brands they interact with to send personalised offers based on their shopping behaviour.

For all businesses with a web presence, this means that not taking advantage of personalisation technologies could cost them a fair bit of business. But doing so, is slowing down pages and driving up business’s bounce rate.

Going viral

One of the biggest changes in marketing over the last decade has been the expansion of viral content campaigns.

Some brands are so unexpectedly successful that their websites just can’t keep up. Rapidly increased demand usually means website downtime.

It’s easy to see how this happens. Dominique Ansel’s now infamous New York Bakery cronut invention increased demands on his website by 300% in a matter of days.

The most challenging part is that no one can predict when a post will go viral. So, it’s difficult to be prepared unless you’re using responsive hosting like that offered by the cloud.

Final thoughts…

Trends like these are unlikely to go away. In fact, content is expected to become ever more complex and data-heavy long into the future. Businesses that act now can get ahead of the curve and ensure their website continues to represent their brand in the best light for years to come.