Slow load times are still an issue for most websites, according to the latest Website Performance Research by digital marketing platform provider SEMrush. In its analysis of 150,000 random websites, it found that over 82.89% of these pages have problems that negatively impact loading time.
KISSmetrics, a customer engagement automation company, found that 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less. About 40% of them stated close sites that take more than three seconds to load. According to Google’s study about site loading times, a delay of five seconds can increase the probability of a user leaving a site without interacting with it by 90%.
Search Rankings
Apart from losing customers who go to your website directly, you may also end up being virtually nonexistent to people who use search engines to look for information on products and services. This is because of Google’s July 2018 Speed Update, which added “load speed” as a factor in the way it ranks search results.
A Matter of Money
When you can’t retain your website’s viewers, it’s only natural that you lose out on conversions, and ultimately, profits. Amazon says they could lose up to $1.6 billion in sales a year if their website slows down by just one second. Pinterest, on the other hand, saw a 15% increase in conversions in 2015 when they decreased their users’ wait time on their website by 40%.
Fast Solutions
Now that you understand the impact of site load time to your bottom line, it’s time to work with your SEO company to make your website perform better. Here are steps you can take to get it loading in a snap.
Keep Those Images Compact
Over 60% of the data transferred to load a web page are image files such as PNGs, GIFs, and JPEGs. While you want to give your customers an immersive experience on your site through the use of pictures, it’s best to shave some off. If you’re going to keep an important one, like a beautiful banner of your storefront in Salt Lake City, it’s best to use compression tools like TinyJPG and TinyPNG to keep its file size low while sacrificing a small amount of image quality.
Shrink Your Page Sizes
Speaking of keeping things compact, you should also keep your page sizes low. Many of your visitors will be on smartphones, too. This is because they often use mobile data to connect to the internet outside of their homes. This type of connection isn’t always consistent, especially in rural areas, so your users may have trouble accessing your pages if they have too much content. Plus, data plans usually have caps on them, so users want to save as much as they can.
Address this possible problem by checking your page sizes first. If they’re around 2 to 2.5 MB, you’re in the clear. If they are over the limit, ask your webmaster to get rid of bloats like custom fonts and redundant code.
Use a Content Delivery Network
While information moves at blazing fast speeds through underground telecommunications cables, distance is still a great part of delivering website content fast. If your site is hosted in Utah, your customers in other countries may have a hard time accessing your website information from your servers. This is where content delivery networks or CDNs come in. A CDN is a network of servers spread out across the world that host website content. This way, your client from Japan will have a faster time visiting your site because they’re accessing it from their local servers.
While you may be focusing on improving your products and services, you should pay attention to the way you present them on the web. You don’t want to lose out on valuable traffic because of slow-loading pages. Give your customers a blazing fast and hassle-free experience on your website, and you’re sure to find the conversions you need.
