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The most common questions posed by almost all the online businesses are, how to increase website visits, how to get more conversions, how to increase sales etc. But many don't realize that the most basic thing that is needed is to have a website that loads fast.
If you still wonder or doubt it really has that much of an effect on your sales, then how’s this for starters - Google and other search engines penalize sites that load slowly.
But that’s not the worst outcome. The website visitors, users, customers etc. stops visiting, bounce off, and may never again return to a website that’s slow as a snail.
No one likes waiting for someone to process their request or provide a service in the real world, right? Same is the case in the digital world, only that people/customers are much more impatient. They expect things to work faster than their expectations.
Sending prospective customers generated by good content on social media sites to websites with slow experiences erodes trust in a matter of seconds. And so you’ll lose out on sales and traffic if your site loads slowly.
Thankfully, it’s not a herculean task to improve. There are various tips and tricks you can use to help your site load faster and improve in traffic and search engine rankings.
How fast should my website be?
According to Amazon, one second of load lag time would cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year.
Did you know that for every second faster your website loads, there is:
Increase in customer satisfaction by 16% which means more audience coming back to you
Increase in page views by 11% which means more people will know about your brand
Increase in conversions by 7% which means more business and revenue for you
Users expect that your website will load quickly. The ideal website load time is 2 seconds or less (47% of people expect your site to load in less than 2 seconds).
Any longer than that, you risk losing your webpage visitors (53% of users abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load).
Many businesses don’t have fast enough websites to keep people on them (the avg. website load time is unfortunately close to 22 seconds). This lack of speed is why slow-loading sites cause $2.6 billion in revenue loss annually.
What is web page load time?
Page load time indicates the time needed for someone to see the content of a webpage in the browser window after they click on your link and get directed to your site. It is the time taken right from the beginning (i.e., when you click on a link or type a web address), to the completion, (i.e., when the page is fully loaded).
Why web page load time matters?
Below are the 3 main reasons why you need to pay attention to your site’s page loading time:
1. It affects your Google ranking
Your website’s average page load time has an impact on the Google search engine ranking. Google uses a particular algorithm to determine a website’s relevance, and the page speed is one of the factors analyzed.
According to Google, it will reduce the number of crawlers it sends to your site if your server is slower than two seconds.
Google wants to provide the best results for searchers, and part of that involves having a fast-loading site. So, if you don’t have a fast site, Google won’t rank your website high in the search results. Moreover, since online search is the way how people find, research, and buy products, one needs to have a fast-loading site so as to rank higher in the search results.
2. It affects user experience
The user experience is vital for effective customer retention and for your business’s success. Long page load times, and poor response times to user actions, create a bad user experience. If users don’t have a positive experience on your site, it will cause them to bounce from your page and land straight back in to the search page results.
People visiting your website are looking for something. Give it to them as quickly as possible. If they can’t access information quickly from your site, they will look elsewhere and that will hurt your chances of ranking in the search results.
3. It affects conversions
Studies show that site speed affects conversion rate (the rate at which users complete a desired action). If people don’t get information fast, they won’t stay on your page, they don’t purchase your products or avail your services. As a result, your conversion rate drops. BBC discovered that they lost 10% of their total webpage visitors for every additional second it took for their pages to load.
Your page speed plays a huge role in whether people will buy your products or use your services. If it takes too long to add something to your cart or too long to check out, people will bounce from your site and try a competitor’s site instead.
Improving site performance is a huge part of conversion rate optimization. Retailer AutoAnything experienced a 12-13% increase in sales after cutting page load time in half. And Walmart discovered that improving page load time by one second increased conversions by 2%.
How to improve site load time?
Now that you have the answer to “How fast should my website be?” and you know why a fast page speed matters, it’s time to look at how you can improve your site’s load time. If you want to improve your average website load time, check out these 7 tips!
1. Reducing images on your site
Visual appeal of the site is something many people focus more on, when designing their website. Images on a site will make it look interesting, professional, and trustworthy. But the downside is that too many images can vastly increase your site’s loading time.
But what if you have an ecommerce business? It will need dozens of product images on your site. After all, you want to give shoppers as many angles and visuals as possible. All these images to your website, is going to slow down your pages.
So, to prevent these images from negatively impacting your average page load time, you can reduce or compress the image size of your files (JPG or PNG) without reducing the quality. This should help your site load faster and provide a better user experience.
2. Enabling browser caching
Browser caching is essential to a fast-loading website. Usually, each time someone visits your page, all of the site elements need to be loaded by your website from scratch. But if this happens every time, they visit your site, it can result in a slow-loading experience.
By enabling browser caching, you create a better experience for your audience. Browser caching allows you to store some data on the user’s device or a temporary storage on their hard drive. The next time they go to the website, their browser can load that webpage without sending an additional HTTP request to the server.
Which means your page will only need to load updated or new pieces of the page. Without the need to load everything, your site will now load faster. Thus, if you have caching enabled, your website speed will be faster for returning visitors.
3. Hosting your videos on an external sites and platform
Yes, it’s true that videos can add lots of value to your website. In fact, 73% of consumers are more likely to buy products online if they can watch a video about it. But just like photos, videos can hurt your site’s load time too, if they’re not properly optimized.
The solution: Hosting videos on an external sites or video-sharing platform (like YouTube). When you host your videos on these platforms, the weight of the videos isn’t on your site. The platform will host your video; then you can simply embed the video on your website. This method will save you server space and speed up your website, thus making you reap the benefits of having video on your website.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
If you want to improve your average page load time, you need to use CDN. Because a CDN allows your audience to access your information faster. How?
Well, you know that your website is hosted on a server. Every time someone visits your site, a request gets sent to that server. When you get high levels of traffic on your site, requests take longer to process. As a result of trying to process these requests, your website slows down for these visitors/users.
Even though high traffic is a good thing for your website, the last thing you want is for this surge in visitors to deter those same people from coming back because of your website speed getting slower.
With a CDN, you can help reduce that slow load time. Instead of using your server, CDNs cache your website on a network of global servers. So, if someone tries to access or requests a file from your website, they won’t use your server, but rather, gets routed to the server closest to their physical location.
The physical location of a visitor/user to your server can also impact how fast your website is for them. People who are farther away from the server will experience slower loading times, even if they aren’t having high volumes of traffic at that time.
Thus, a CDN can help people get information faster and improve the load time of the website.
5. Reduce redirects on your site
Another simple but often overlooked thing is the redirects on your website. One needs to reduce the number of redirects on their site, because it slows down the website.
When you have redirects on your site, it triggers an additional HTTP request-response cycle. When this happens, it adds extra time to your site’s load time. This added time slows down your site. So, refrain from stuffing your website with redirects or referrals.
6. Uninstalling Unused Plugins
Plugins are a great way to improve the performance of your website and they tend to make my life much easier.
But too many plugins can make your website heavy and slow down your loading times. So, it’s in your best interest to only install plugins that you’re actually going to use. Also look for all-in-one solutions so you don’t need to get one for every little feature (E.g., A single plugin that supports LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc. rather than plugins for each).
7. Minifying and Combining files
Another way of have a fast-loading website, is to minify and combine files. While reducing the number of files is good, you don’t want to delete files that is necessary for your business on the website. You can always minify or combine them to minimize their weight.
Minifying removes unnecessary characters from your files, such as formatting and white space. It gets rid of anything that isn’t required for your code to function. This ultimately reduces your file sizes.
Combining files reduces the number of HTTP requests by concentrating them into smaller groups. For example, a browser can potentially download six smaller files faster than one giant file.
You can combine files from the same file type, such as:
HTML files
CSS files
JavaScript files
Google fonts
By combining or minifying these file sizes, you’ll help improve site load time and have a fast-loading site.
Just keep in mind, that it’s a continuous process that involves regular monitoring, tweaking and testing.
So, now that you know that Page loading times can make or break the success of your site, why wait?
Start improving your site’s load time right now!
Need UPDATE Technologies to help you with creating fast-loading business websites? Contact us or request a quote.#PageLoadTime #WebsiteSpeed #GoogleRanking #UserExperience #Conversions #BrowserCaching #ContentDeliveryNetwork #Plugins #Minify
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