Migrating to Marketo Engage is an exciting step for any company looking to elevate its marketing automation capabilities. However, one of the most common challenges encountered during migration is landing page loading performance. Slow loading times, particularly before go-live, can affect testing, user experience, and overall campaign effectiveness. To help ensure a seamless experience, Leadous, as your trusted marketing automation consultants, has put together these best practices to address these issues both before and after go-live.

Why Landing Pages May Load Slowly Before Go-Live

Before go-live, landing pages may be slower due to several common factors:

• Staging Environment Overhead: Landing pages are often hosted in staging or testing environments with limited resources, affecting load speeds.
• Unoptimized Assets: Assets such as images, videos, and scripts may not yet be compressed for the web, causing bloated file sizes and slower loads.
• Unfinished Integrations: Landing pages may rely on third-party integrations (like analytics, CRMs, or personalization engines) that are incomplete or not optimized during testing.
• DNS and Hosting Configurations: Pre-go-live DNS settings and hosting infrastructure may still be configured for testing rather than production, leading to slower response times.
• How to Improve Loading Times Before Go-Live
• Optimize assets early by compressing images, videos, and files using tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim.
• Simulate production conditions by testing landing pages in an environment that mirrors the final production setup, including server capacity and CDN configurations.
• Preload critical resources such as hero images or critical CSS files to improve initial loading.
• Minimize JavaScript and CSS files, remove unnecessary code, and load non-essential scripts asynchronously.
• Ensure all third-party services and integrations are active and properly configured to avoid delays caused by failed API calls.

Why Landing Pages May Still Be Slow After Go-Live

Even after go-live, some challenges may persist, such as:

• High Traffic Spikes: Campaign launches often result in sudden traffic surges, which can strain server resources.
• Unoptimized Hosting Infrastructure: A lack of content delivery networks (CDNs) or insufficient hosting for global traffic can contribute to slow loading times.
• Dynamic Content Overload: Excessive use of tokens and dynamic personalization can slow down performance if not implemented efficiently.
• Tracking and Tag Overhead: Overuse of tracking pixels and scripts can increase HTTP requests and load times.

Best Practices to Improve Loading Times After Go-Live

• Leverage a CDN such as Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, or Akamai to serve static assets from servers closer to your users.
• Implement lazy loading for non-critical assets, such as images below the fold, to improve initial load speed.
• Streamline tracking scripts by consolidating or minimizing their use, and load them asynchronously when possible.
• Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Lighthouse to identify and resolve bottlenecks in real-time.
• Ensure your hosting environment is robust enough to handle high traffic, including scalable server resources or cloud-based solutions.
• Optimize the use of dynamic elements by combining tokens where possible and avoiding excessive dynamic logic.

Ongoing Maintenance Post-Go-Live

Conduct regular performance audits to identify and address new bottlenecks as campaigns scale.

Monitor user experience with heatmaps, analytics, and A/B testing to identify and refine slow-loading elements.

Periodically update assets to ensure they adhere to web performance best practices, including proper compression and file format selection.

Leadous, as experts in marketing automation and Marketo Engage migrations, specializes in identifying and addressing these challenges to ensure your campaigns are successful from day one. Performance optimization is not just a one-time effort—it’s an ongoing process. With the right partner by your side, your landing pages will consistently deliver exceptional user experiences that drive engagement and revenue. Let Leadous lead the way to marketing success.

ABOUT LEADOUS INC.
Leadous is a world class consultancy that leverages marketing automation to deliver exceptional experiences for the journey makers and the journey takers. The journey between “Hello Prospect” to “Welcome Valued Client” can be difficult to navigate. From concept to conversion, Leadous utilizes technology, methodology, and certified experts to deliver consulting services that increase demand, drive conversion, and deliver pipeline growth making the journey a well-traveled one. Our decade-long, world-class partnerships give us the capabilities to serve hundreds of clients, across industries, to obtain measurable value from their investments in customer journey solutions from email to automation. LET US LEAD YOU.

Contact us at info@leadous.com.