When designing and maintaining your presence online, it’s important to keep in mind that there may be some remote, rural areas where 5G and 4G coverage could be limited due to geographical challenges and lower population density. Homes in these areas tend to have highly varied internet speeds. If your site does not load promptly or correctly in this environment, you may lose business to competitors with sites that do.
Designing for these users involves first knowing who they are and what you want to share with them. Even if the differences are non-existent, it is important to reiterate to yourself and your team that your visitors may have urban expectations on rural WiFi. Once you’ve established what a rural visitor needs from your website, you can make informed design choices that improve the customer journey and ultimately drive conversions.
What We'll Cover
Considering Remote Areas
Depending where your business is located, or where your target customers are, you may have more visitors located in remote areas than you think. Here are some things to keep in mind when wondering if this applies to you:
- You have a storefront, anywhere. Even if your business is located in the center of a city, it is at most a day trip from a rural area. Residents of remote areas visiting or vacationing in your city may likely plan their itinerary before they leave, since they will be busy visiting once they arrive.
- Your online business delivers to remote areas. If your area of sales covers geographically remote regions, you should consider this demographic in your web design and messaging.
- Your online services can be accessed by residents in a remote area. This goes especially for organizations that welcome members anywhere nationwide. Some potential members could be from remote areas. If your site cannot load readily on an older device or network, you may lose that membership.
- Your competitors are active in remote areas. For the above reasons, if your competitors are not paying attention, now’s the time to make your play.
There are a wide array of empathetic reasons to consider users in these regions. Everyone should have equal access to your products or services regardless their device or location within your sales area. Easy access to your products, services, ministry, etc, regardless from where they are, is a great addition to your existing brand messaging.
Design strategy
Many factors taken into account for rural and remote users can also be relevant to good web design generally. Revisit the following when designing or optimizing your site:
Optimize Page Load Times
This is probably the most important takeaway. If the page takes too long to load, it will frustrate your visitors and encourage them to leave. If they stay, the relationship is off to a rocky start and may negatively impact conversions. Prioritize efficient web page loading by minimizing the use of large images, videos, and other heavy multimedia content. Compress images and use image formats optimized for websites like .webp to reduce file sizes without compromising quality.
Progressive Loading
In a similar vein to page speed, if you load interactive or important elements first, the page is still “usable” even if loading is still in progress. Implement progressive loading techniques, such as lazy loading which allows the essential parts of a web page to load first. This provides users with immediate access to critical information. Additional content can then load in the background as the user scrolls.
Try Caching and Local Storage
This is particularly useful if you expect frequent repeat visitors to your website. This is also helpful if you just cannot optimize your site’s loading performance beyond a certain point. You can only minimize image file sizes so much. Utilize browser caching and local storage to store certain elements of the website locally on the user’s device. This reduces the need for repeated downloads of static resources when users revisit the site.
Target a “Mobile-First” Approach
Leveraging responsive web design with a mobile-first mindset to ensure that the website performs well on devices commonly used in rural areas. Compared to urban areas, device models may span a greater variety of brands and ages in the countryside. If possible, when developing your pages, also test the website directly on older devices and uncommon screen sizes to ensure responsiveness and a universally clean look.
Stick to Minimalist Design
In the spirit of mobile-first and speed-optimized pages, adopt a minimalist design approach to reduce clutter and distractions. A clean and simple design not only enhances loading times but also improves overall usability for users with limited bandwidth. This goes beyond just design elements like images and elements. Ensure your pages are well organized so users do not have to scroll around as much to find what they need, and instead can select the page that matters most to them. For ideas, engage with your staff to identify how users interact with them through your website. Then, update accordingly.
Limit Reliance on Third-Party Scripts
Minimize the use of third-party scripts and widgets that can slow down website performance. Each additional script adds extra requests that can negatively impact loading times.
The Takeaway
The difference in internet speeds between rural and urban areas can vary significantly and is influenced by various factors. In general, rural areas tend to experience slower and less consistent internet speeds compared to their urban counterparts. This divide should be a consideration in your web design strategy. As described above, it goes beyond only faster load times. Embracing the unique needs of rural users not only serves as a step towards bridging the digital divide but also provides an edge in bringing your business overlooked market opportunities.
