7 Best Tips to Speed Up Website and Better Conversion
Tired of not getting enough leads?
Maybe your website looks stunning and every features work just perfectly but still, you are wondering why it is not getting satisfactory conversion rate!
Well, this is the time to give it a thought.
Speed – that’s a very crucial factor behind a website being popular and successful. No one loves to wait a lot! A delay of just one-second in the page loading time can cause
- Almost 7% conversion loss
- A decrease in the customer satisfaction factor by 16%
- Around 11% lesser page views
You cannot expect your website visitors to visit your website and waste a few extra seconds time on it just to load it! You need to keep in mind that they have plenty of other options available in the market. So, why would they waste time on your website?
Hence, even one-second matters a lot, even one second can have a huge impact to keep a visitor engaged and to make sales.
The Impact of Website Speed on Conversions
A slow website is a major turn off for the visitors.
Almost 73% of the total mobile internet users state that they have come across such websites that are utterly slow. Many surveys and studies have reflected the fact that almost 40% of visitors will abandon your website page if the page loading time is more than 3 seconds! As a matter of fact, 47% of customers expect different sites to load within 2 seconds or less.
So, this is easily understandable if your website loading time is more than 3 seconds, you are already out of the race. According to a survey report, customer satisfaction gets decreased by 16% if a website loads in 1-second delay. Moreover, almost 79% of the customers have stated they would not visit a website with poor performance again!
Image Source: neilpatel.com
Walmart is a good example of how the conversion rate increased resulting in better revenue once they boosted up their website’s speed. An analysis made by their expert team revealed that the converted visitors had received such pages that had two times faster loading speed than the visitors, who were not convinced to get converted.
Another study made on the relationship between website loading time and business conversion rates reported that just 1 second extra loading time can decrease the conversion rate by almost 25%.
Image Source: conversionxl.com
Even the tech giant Google once had an experience of a 20% drop in the site traffic. And the reason behind it was a delayed page loading time by extra 0.5 seconds.
If you are wondering this as an isolated case, then Greg Linden, the inventor of Amazon’s recommendations shared kind of a similar experience on his popular blog “Geeking with Greg”. He mentioned
Google and Amazon are undoubtedly two of the most reputable and well-known websites. So, when the customers or visitors are not waiting for an extra second for these popular websites to get loaded, most probably they will not wait for your website as well!
Now, worried about how can you diminish the page loading time of your website that will result in increased revenue? Here is a video to help you out!
Video Source: Neil Patel
Good Loading Time – What Is That?
Well, now that you need to work on your website’s speed with your team of PHP programmers, read on and enlighten yourself a bit on good loading time that will help you to set a goal, where you need to take your website.
As stated by the Google, 3 seconds is the best practice. Unfortunately, a recent benchmark report findings reflected that fact that most of the websites are nowhere near to this benchmark! Check out the detailed report here.
The report mentioned that as a web page loading time goes from 1 second to 10 seconds, the bouncing rate of mobile users increased by almost 123%!
Image Source: thinkwithgoogle.com
This definitely means the site owners have tons of works to do to get better positions in Google’s eyes.
Tips to Speed Up Website
Tons of factors are there to influence the site loading speed. Here, we are going to discuss 7 best practices. Maybe you don’t need to work on every aspect mentioned here, maybe your website already complies with some of it. Hence, read on and get started!
#1 Minimising HTTP Requests
To minimise the number of HTTP requests, you need to understand currently, how many of such requests are generated by your site.
Not sure how to check that? Well, if you are a Google Chrome user, with the help of the browser’s Developer Tools, you can check it.
Go to the web page to be analysed, right-click on it, then click on “Inspect” followed by a click on the “Network” tab. All files of this particular page are shown under “Name” column, the “Size” column depicts each file size and the loading time of each file is shown under the “Time” column.
Analyse which files are unnecessary and get rid of them. It will not only decrease the page loading time but also will increase the overall revenue.
#2 Minify Files and Combine Them
Now, you already know to check the total number of HTTP requests your page generates. To get started with decreasing the number, start with JavaScript, HTML and CSS files.
Your website’s appearance depends on these aforementioned aspects. Also, whenever a visitor visits your website, these factors add to the total number of requests.
Minifying the files and combining them is a great idea to diminish this number. To minify files, you need to remove unnecessary whitespace, code and formatting. Maintaining proper indentation is important as well.
Your target should be to make the website as lean as possible.
#3 Load JavaScript and CSS Files in Asynchronous way
There are two different ways in which JavaScript and CSS files can be loaded – Synchronously and asynchronously.
In synchronous loading, each script loads one at a time. And the order of their loading follows the order they appear on your website page. In asynchronous loading, scripts load on the page simultaneously.
While loading a page, its movement is from the top to the bottom. In the case of synchronous loading, until and unless a JavaScript or CSS file that comes in between loads completely, the other files simply stop loading. Hence, choosing asynchronous loading for CSS files JavaScripts is a better choice to speed up website loading time.
#4 Opt for Right Hosting Option
Cheapest options always attract more people. However, you need to keep one thing in mind that even if opting for the cheapest hosting option is acceptable at the starting, you need to upgrade it once you are getting more traffic.
Usually, 3 different options are available for hosting service.
- VPS hosting
- Shared hosting
- Dedicated server
In the case of VPS hosting, though you have to share the server with some other websites, still you have access to some dedicated portions of your server’s resources.
In the shared hosting option, you have to share resources such as disk space, RAM, CPU with other websites that are being hosted on the same server as you.
When you have a dedicated server, space is not an issue at all. If you are comfortable with all the configuration as well as technical setup along with spending a bit more money than shared hosting, this dedicated server is the best option.
Well, all these aforementioned hosting options have been explained brilliantly by KeyCDN using a relevant and easily understandable analogy. Check out the detailed article here.
#5 Allow Browser Caching
When a visitor, first time visits a particular website, all the stylesheets, HTML documents, images, JavaScript files – everything is downloaded. Different experiments have shown that more or less 30 such components can be stored within 2.4 seconds.
Now, the next time when the visitor comes to that particular website, different components are already stored in the user’s cache. Hence, the website loads faster this time.
Tenni Theurer, formerly of the Yahoo has explained this browser caching in a detailed way. You can check out the research report made by the team.
According to Theurer, almost 40% to 60% of the daily visitors come to your website for the first time. Hence, you need to work on making the site loading speed fast for these first-time visitors so that you can offer a better and improved user experience.
#6 Diminish Image Sizes
Well, to make a website attractive and eye catchy to the visitors, you are bound to use high-quality images. However, often such images are so large in size that can slow down the page loading time. But not using images is never an option. Why? Well, read on!
Various research reports and surveys have reflected the fact that usually, the average eCommerce sites conversions float around 1% to 3%. Studies have shown that almost 66% of customers prefer to see at least 3 photos of the product before making the purchase. Got the idea why images are important? Also, Radware stated that 45% of the best 100 eCommerce websites do not use compressed product images!
However, using optimised images would be a brilliant idea in this case. Optimising and resizing images can have a huge impact on making the page loading time faster. According to a report made by a study, a website response time got reduced by 70% on resizing the images of size 22MB to only 300KB.
Instead of uploading an image with a large width and then setting the parameters, cropping it to the suitable width and then uploading it on the website is a good idea.
To compress the image files, you can use different tools. WP Smush is one of such great tools for your website if it is running on the WordPress.
Not a WordPress user? Compressor.io is a great non-WordPress tool that can be used for a similar purpose.
Next thing to look after is using the appropriate image file type. Most commonly used file types are PNG. JPG and GIF. Usually, JPG images significantly reduce the loading time without affecting the appearance. PNG image size is a bit larger than JPG image and it uses lossless compression. For line art, screenshots, logos along with other detailed graphics, PNG file type is a great choice.
It is advisable not to use TIFF and BMP file types.
#7 Optimise CSS Delivery
The styling of your page is done by using CSS. However, it is better not to include the CSS in the HTML code. Keep your code cleaner and put all CSS in the external stylesheet.
While setting up the styles, it is a good practice to use only one external CSS stylesheet as any additional stylesheet will increase the number of HTTP requests.
Not sure about your current CSS setup? You can check out this CSS delivery tool to see the detailed report on all the external CSS files and set everything accordingly.
Next, to make sure there is no render-blocking CSS, you can use this PageSpeed Insights tool. Still having render-blocking issues? You can follow this Google’s recommendations to optimise the CSS delivery.
See, to make a website more conversion-oriented you need to take care of a lot of aspects. You don’t want all the efforts of the PHP programmers, who built a stunning website for your business to go unproductive. However, wrapping up all the tips within a short span is really not so easy! There are more aspects like
- Deferring the JavaScript loading
- Minimising the time to the first byte
- Diminishing the response time of the server
- Running an audit for compression
- Enabling compression
- Using a CDN
- Reducing the total number of various plugins used on the site
- Reducing redirects
- Reducing external scripts
- Monitoring the speed of mobile page
- Monitoring the speed over time and many more.
We are going to discuss regarding all the aforementioned points along with how to proceed further with these to make the site more conversion-oriented in our next blog! Till then, make the necessary changes according to the points that have been discussed in brief above.
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