News From the Legal Expert in May
The need for speed. As lawyers, we understand deadlines and crunch time in the everyday practice of law. Speed is also important for your website and web hosting. For larger sites like Google or Amazon, even the slightest delay could cause a significant decrease in activity and sales. It was reported in 2019 that Amazon estimated that a one-second delay could lead to $1.6 billion fewer sales per year, and Google claims that a one-second delay would mean eight million fewer searches on any given day.
Now your firms’ site doesn’t get the traffic or transactions of Google or Amazon but speed matters. It’s a simple concept: if the pages on your site take too long to load, you will lose visitors or potential clients. In addition, multiple studies have shown that site speed affects conversion rate when the consumers fill out your form.
In addition, Google uses page load times as a factor in their algorithm when determining search engine results. Therefore, Google will prioritize serving up relevant search results to users as quickly as possible. Site performance on mobile devices is especially important. While not the only factor, speed is a factor and needs to be considered. If you want your firm site to be competitive, it should perform as fast as possible.
When you consider your firm’s site speed, you should talk with the company that runs your website and ask questions about how your website is hosted.
- Is your site on its own server or a shared server with other sites? For example, – if your site lives in a shared environment, how many other sites are on your server?
- What type of server hardware is being used?
- Where is your server located?
These are just a few items to discuss with your host. There are many technical and SEO issues beyond the scope of this post. Still, I would strongly recommend researching some of the technical and SEP issues related to hosting speed and raise them with your hosting provider.
Get in the game and play hard. Talk with multiple internet marketing companies. Many specialize in law firm marketing. Schedule demos, pick their brains, and invest the time. It’s easier than going back to law school, and it will pay off.
