
At Weidert Group, we don’t just maximize the power of inbound marketing with our clients, we fully use it ourselves. Similarly, we don’t just talk about the power of growth-driven design (GDD), we use it on our own website.
This blog post — which is more like a mini-case study — dives into a little problem we had with our website speed and explains how we fixed it using the process of growth-driven design.
Feel free to skip to the next section if you’re a growth-driven design (GDD) wizard. Need a quick review? Read on!
GDD is a method of designing and maintaining a website that leverages user data to inspire continuous changes. Our belief in its efficiency and productivity as a web development approach is so great, we developed this 100% free comprehensive guide to GDD.
The GDD action process is similar to the scientific method. If it’s good enough for four centuries of acquiring knowledge, it’s good enough for us! Here’s a side-by-side comparison:
GDD | vs. | Scientific Method |
State an Objective | = | Formulate a Question |
Create a Hypothesis | = | Develop a Hypothesis / Make a Prediction |
Conduct the Experiment | = | Test Hypothesis by Conducting Experiments |
Achieve Results | = | Analyze Results |
Study Learning | = | Decide on the Next Actions |
How and why did we put GDD to the test? It starts with looking at the site speed of weidert.com.
Studies show over and over that fast website page speed leads to better conversion rates. Visitors are more likely to do what you want them to the quicker a webpage loads.
There's a bunch of data about how a website’s loading time affects conversion rates. But, what you really need to know is this simple:
2.4 seconds = 1.9% conversion rate
5.7+ seconds = <0.6% conversion rate
Shaving off just over 3 seconds triples the conversion rate (thank you, Cloudflare.com for the stats). Yes, other factors affect a website’s conversion rate (page design and layout, text and images on a page, etc.), yet optimizing website speed should improve conversion rates no matter what other areas require optimization. Plus, it should improve SEO results, too.
So, on to the issue with the Weidert Group website. Our page speed had worsened over several months, so our web development team dug in to discover why. They implemented the GDD action process.
RELATED: How Google Core Vitals Will Change B2B Website Performance and Ranking
At Weidert, we use various tools to measure page speed in order to find areas for improvement: Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom Website Speed Test, and Website Grader.
Using Google PageSpeed Insights, we found that several modules developed for our new website were creating individual CSS files. Each file required another HTTP request to the server, which slowed down the speed of the site.
That lead to an obvious first step ...
… and a logical second step:
We saw some interesting results!
Mobile Page Speed Insight Scores | Control | Test |
First Contentful Paint (seconds) | 4.0 | 3.7 |
Speed Index (seconds) | 6.0 | 5.4 |
Largest Contentful Paint (seconds) | 4.2 | 4.3 |
Time to Interactive (seconds) | 12.6 | 12.9 |
Total Blocking Time (ms) | 610 | 1,070 |
Cumulative Layout Shift | 0.983 | 1.077 |
In all honesty, it was a mixed bag. The site was smaller with fewer files to be loaded, and the overall speed did improve. However, some of the changes increased the amount of time for some things to improve.
By continuing to monitor results, we can determine if our hypothesis is correct in an actual working environment and over the long run. We’ll also monitor conversion rates over time to see if page speed improves conversion rates.
Now that you’ve seen the importance of website page speed optimization, find out more about growth-driven design; it’s much more complex than simply improving site speed.
Topics: Conversion Rate Optimization, Website Design, Growth-Driven Design