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UX

Just Turn It Off, For Website Speed.

A recent blog post highlights a long-held frustration of mine. Adding more script-heavy functions on your website worsens your website’s user experience. But people still add new plugins, with all manner of features they don’t need incurring performance hit after performance hit to their websites. 

“People will forgive a lot, but slow sites speed tends not to be overlooked by humans or search engine crawlers. It doesn’t matter if most of your traffic is from desktop browsers; in September 2020, Google switched fully to mobile-first indexing. It’s worth noting every update Google (no matter how much AI is used) has rolled out in the past five years seems to place a greater priority on mobile site performance.” Reads the post *disclosure* posted by an agency with whom I’ve worked.

Years ago, adding live chat apps to websites was the big push. With articles claiming conversion rates would increase by as much as 30% just by adding a live chat. The thing is live chats load a hell of a lot of scripts, often on every page of the website, and are not used by the vast majority of consumers. So, every page of the site is made slower for every visitor to the site, and the site loses traffic from Google search all so a small number of consumers can use a feature. That’s not a good trade-off. 

Consumers prefer may live chat to using a contact form or calling a phone number. But bombarding users on every page with an option to speak to your company’s representative, or let’s be a real bot is just not anyone’s preference. 

In my experience and in all the studies I can find that aren’t funded by companies selling chat widgets, giving consumers the option to chat is good, but trying to force that interaction is very bad. 

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