Lighten the Load: Why Slim Web Pages Are Essential in an AI-Fueled World
In digital, speed is synonymous with strength. Website owners have long been told that site speed is crucial for SEO and overall user satisfaction. A new source of urgency is emerging: the rise of performance-hungry AI technology.
Lighter web pages aren’t just a technical requisite. They are the foundation for delivering a seamless user experience amidst the AI revolution.
The Era of Instantaneity
If you’ve ever been on the Eurostar, hurtling down the tracks at thrilling speeds, you know how frustrating it is when the train slows to a crawl and then grounds to a halt. Much like crawling to Paris, today’s websites are often bogged down by hefty-sized pages, resulting in the erosion of speed, performance, and ultimately, user engagement.
I love creating fancy things for the web. Yet, every line of code, every image, and every feature I place on a webpage weighs it down a little more. We’re serving webpages to more powerful machines through faster connections but we’re about to start delivering truly performance-hungry tech and that’s going to have an impact.
As new technologies like AI and machine learning algorithms are embedded on websites, we will need to understand the trade-off between functionality and performance. These capabilities, while groundbreaking, are voracious in their appetite for resources. A lean website is paramount for AI’s peak performance.
Speed and Beyond: A Matter of User Experience
As I’ve demoed new AI functionality to those not obsessed with tech, a common refrain has been, “Why is it taking so long?” Speed is now a locked-in expectation. Just as we expect to get from London to Paris in two hours, we expect things immediately to happen on the web.
This is not just about loading times. It’s about how users feel when navigating through the digital realms we create. A lag here, a buffer there – these moments, though seemingly minuscule, are where frustration brews and engagement drops.
Subtle yet profound, the heavy toll of slow and bulky websites becomes more evident with each passing day. It’s not simply a metric to appease search algorithms; it lies at the heart of the experience of every curious soul who clicks on a link searching for knowledge, connection, or service.
Embracing Simplicity
It’s time to rediscover the art of subtraction. Through the lens of simplicity, let’s begin to reimagine the web spaces we create.
We should create experiences that marry the beauty of simplicity with the depth of AI.
Much like a gifted architect refrains from cluttering spaces to allow inhabitants to fill them with life, we must craft web pages that leave room for technology to breathe and perform. We need more piazzas and fewer malls.
Weaving It All Together
As we stand at the frontier of a technological revolution, our principles and practices must evolve as well. Weaving the tapestry of a lighter web requires meticulous attention to detail, a spirit of innovation, and a willingness to question legacy decisions.
Ultimately, I need to practice what I preach. Over the coming weeks, I’m going to get into the weeds of my simple WordPress site and whittle away the unnecessary elements to make it much lighter. Whoever runs your website should probably do the same, too.
Digital Storytelling: A Dance with Attention
In a digital age marked by fleeting glances and swipe-happy fingers, storytelling faces a formidable opponent: the short attention span. The narrative that once unfolded leisurely over the curled pages of well-worn novels now competes with the immediate gratification of 280-character quips and six-second videos.
So, how does one captivate a skittish audience? The challenge isn’t new—storytellers have always vied for the ears and eyes of the public. Yet, modern digital storytelling demands an evolved dance with attention, choreographed to the rhythm of urgency and intrigue.
The first Impression
Consider the imperative of grabbing attention early. A bold claim? A provocative question? Or perhaps an unexpected image? A picture might be worth not just a thousand words but a thousand clicks. Making an undeniable first impression is crucial—let the audience glimpse the white rabbit they can’t resist chasing.
Writing with varying pace
Of course, securing initial attention is not enough. The art of writing with pace redefines the modern narrative. We consume on-the-go, our screens in one hand, while life rushes by alongside. Here, break away from the metronome—that constant, underlying rhythm. Writing to a beat creates a monotone thrum in the reader’s mind. Mix it up with the cut and thrust of short sentences followed by longer, descriptive ones, that compel the reader to move forward. Immediate, punchy openings give way to insightful, exploratory passages, taking a breath before propelling into the next swirl of activity.
This rhythm, individual as a fingerprint, is what lures the reader on. Readers should find themselves feverishly scrolling through a post, curiosity piqued by the dance between fact and narrative, research and reflection.
Keeping the flame alive
Employing a broad range of references and analogies is akin to adding wood to the fire—it ignites and then invigorates the reader’s attention. Once a reader is engaged, weaving AI to ancient mythology, or linking marketing to the philosophy of choice keeps their brain working. The narrative becomes a tapestry, each thread an opportunity to hook the reader’s interest anew.
When written artfully, it’s irrelevant whether the reader came for the technology tips or the existential musings. They stay for the sheer delight of watching seemingly separate worlds collide and coalesce into insights they hadn’t imagined.
Strum the strings
In the digital age, stringing words together is not enough; you must strum something deeper, too. Digital storytelling requires pacing, a diverse palette of references, and a deeply personal voice. It’s about engaging intellectually and emotionally—offering a hand to the reader, inviting them into an ever-shifting dance of the digital narrative.
We must be conductors of curiosity, leading our audience through tempo changes, thought-provoking leaps, and the reassuring presence of our shared humanity. Let’s tell stories that resonate beyond the flicker of the screen.
Stitching together January
Couplets
I’m a regular listener of the excellent Empire podcast, hosted by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple. They’re currently focusing on Persia. A highlight is their episode on Ferdowsi, a poet credited with reviving Persian culture through his epic poem, the Shahnameh. I was so drawn in by the episode that I’m currently wading through the Penguin Classics translation.
The epic consists of 50,000 couplets. This struck a chord with me. The Bhagavad Gita is also written in couplets. Indeed, across the Middle East and Asia, couplets seem to be the favoured form to pass information forward through time.
I then stumbled on toward Shakespeare, form, meter, feet, and ended up very confused at iambic pentameter. I moved on. I can see why free form poetry is so popular.
Talking of form…
Is this story storying?
I understand this is how the kids are speaking now. When something is a good example of its type, it is deemed to be whatever-ing. So a good hoodie is hoodie-ing. I love this expression, but much too uncool to actually use it.
This, along with a few other trends, got me thinking about how we tell stories. How we tell them online has changed. So, what is a good story now? I’ve spent much of the month discussing, thinking and playing around with storytelling. How we do it. And how we might do it better. Particularly with data. And especially in a world when we’re all just little faces on a screen. Perhaps the storytelling techniques of TikTok might be applicable to Teams or Zoom?
My answers for better storytelling so far include winning attention early and the use of jeopardy to create urgency. Short form stories and media might be a readymade template for this. If you want your zooms to be zooming, then your stories need to be storying.
And speaking of better…
Better vs Faster (the inevitable AI section)
My thinking on AI this month has focused on how we can learn more in order to make better decisions, rather than just produce things faster.
Much has been written and said about the inevitable forward progress of technology. I don’t disagree with it. The Luddites didn’t stop the looms. However, all fabric is not equal. A loom can make a coarse woollen cloth, or something finer and more valuable. The latter takes new knowledge. That’s where I’m most interested in playing.
Of course, one of the paths to new knowledge is to free up time to explore. So, perhaps faster is an enabler of better. It’s an “and” not an “or”.
On AI, I’m going to move faster. My goal, though, is to land at better.
Three content priorities
I’ve spent much of the summer having conversations about content. I’ve talked about it with those at the creative end and the technical end. I’ve had conversations about consumer-focused content and B2B. During these conversations, three themes kept coming up: the importance of the journey, the importance of social proof, and the increasing importance of how pages are structured.
First off, let’s just take a moment to define content. In this context I’m not just referring to blogs or articles. I’m talking all content on a website. All the corporate stuff, the customer stuff, and the product and service listings. Everything.
Journeys
Journeys as a corporate metaphor have been used so much that they are now beyond cliché. However, for content, journeys are not a metaphor they are critical for planning, optimisation and effectiveness.
Whether the traffic that reaches a page is driven there by organic search, email, paid media, a link or from another page on the site, content consumption happens within a sequence of events. Typically referred to as the user journey, it doesn’t really matter what it’s called, the important thing is that it is understood. You cannot effectively create content without understanding what brought someone to it and what they were hoping to achieve.
Too much content is created without critically thinking about people’s intentions. Yes, at the most commercial end of the content spectrum, a huge amount of effort goes into understanding intent, maximising click-throughs and optimising calls-to-action.
I’ve been guilty of this. I’m guessing many of you have too. We all know the content we’re talking about. The stuff that ranks well in search but perennially delivers low click-throughs, little dwell time and incredibly high bounce rates.
However, content that doesn’t sit at the sharp end of the sales funnel rarely gets this attention. That’s understandable. Resource is limited and you want to invest it where you’ll get a return. Perhaps it’s time to push some resources higher up the funnel? You’ll likely find quick wins and, although it might take time and the subsequent data will be unclear, widening the top of the funnel should deliver increased numbers at the bottom.
Show not tell
This is an old and trusted marketing maxim. It speaks to providing social proof. People buy things that lots of other people buy. Review sites from Trustpilot to TripAdvisor and Glassdoor exist because people want the reassurance. Influencer marketing, and regulators’ insistence that commercial partnerships are explicitly stated, is another example.
Whether it’s review scores, third party endorsements or case studies, we know that social proof is a valued and important part of the sales journey. And yet, case studies often sit at the rarely visited bottom of a page. You know, the place to which no one scrolls. Review scores are shoved in at the top of many of the most commercial pages but the reviews themselves sit much further down. Influencers, and the landing pages associated with their campaigns, often offer discounts. In effect ignoring the impact of social proof for the volume driven by price reductions.
I suspect one of the main reasons we underplay social proof by placing it out of sight, is because pages have always been built with big benefits and calls-to-action at the top, followed by advantages and features, and then all the rest. There is an opportunity here to test how effective reviews, case studies and endorsements could be when they’re actually seen.
Structural integrity
Page structure feels like the big project no one wants to touch. We all know that in an ideal world a page would only have one H1 tag. That H2 tags would always denote the next level down in terms of headings. But we also know that when building pages in a necessarily rigid CMS, the temptation exists to use an H tag as a styling element to achieve a certain look rather than its original intended purpose. Let’s all take a quiet moment to admit we’ve all done it and continue to do it once the precedent’s been set.
Well, Google’s been pulling H1 tags into search results. It’s delivering specific excerpts from sections of webpages in search results and sending people directly to those sections when they click on the result.
As search engines continue their efforts to deliver the best possible results, the structure of webpages will become critical. In essence, search engines are trying to make sense of data and the more structured it is the easier that job is.
Perhaps it’s time to grab the nettle and tidy up your site structure.