Whether you run an e-commerce site or an online storefront to showcase your brick-and-mortar business, you should make your website’s loading speed one of your top priorities.
Why? Well…
…nearly half of all consumers expect a website to load within 2 seconds. Adding just 1 second to your site’s loading time will cause 40 percent to click back to the results. This one-second delay represents 11 percent fewer page views and a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction.
Worst of all, a one-second delay slashes conversions by 7 percent.
Even the titans of industry recognized that a small investment in website performance can lead to big returns. Amazon, for example, claimed revenues climbed 1 percent for every 100 milliseconds shaved from their site’s loading time, while Walmart reported higher conversion rates – 2 percent for every second, in fact.
To achieve the same, or even better, results as these deep-pocketed corporations, here are 6 ways to speed up your site for higher returns:
- Enable compression. According to Google, nearly one-third of webpages could cut their storage usage by 250 kilobytes (KB) simply by compressing, or “zipping”, images and text. Using ZIP files decreases a page’s bandwidth, significantly reducing HTTP response, or the number of times a server must send a signal to load each element of your page.
- Optimize images. You don’t necessarily have to sacrifice image quality for loading speed. There are three image attributes you should address: size, format, and URL. Always resize photos to fit the dimensions of your website, use JPEG format whenever possible, and ensure your photo is uploaded with a valid URL, also known as an src attribute.
- Prioritize above-the-fold content. Above-the-fold content is any content that appears on the screen before scrolling. If your website simply has a lot of indispensable elements, you can optimize above-the-fold content to load quicker than the rest of the page. Since the content displayed differs based on screen size, you can get a better idea of what elements will appear first by using Safari’s “Responsive Design Mode” found in the “Develop” dropdown menu. This feature allows you to see how your webpage will appear on most devices, from iPhones to iPads and Desktops.
- Enable browser caching. Browser caching enables your website to store the fundamental elements of your site, such as HTML documents, CSS stylesheets, and JavaScript files, in a temporary storage file on a visitor’s computer. Because some components of your site are readily available on the user’s hard drive, your site does not have to send as many server requests the next time a potential customer visits.
- Use the minimum number of plugins possible. Plugins can be great, as they add functionality to your website without having to rewrite your website’s base code. However, use too many, or incompatible, plugins and they can cause technical difficulties and potential security issues. If your site is lethargic, you can root out the culprits by disabling one plugin at a time, then testing page response time.
- Find a reliable web hosting service. Web hosting provides the servers, or storage, for websites. A reliable web host will ensure every user’s connection to these servers is both fast and secure. If your hosting service is down for even a few seconds, you could potentially lose thousands in revenues. Consider Amazon’s server crisis back in 2008. Their site was unavailable for 40 minutes, amounting to about $5 million in lost sales. Issues such as these are completely preventable simply by choosing the right web hosting provider.
You might have earned a spot at the top of Google’s organic results, but, clearly, none of that matters if your site is moving at a turtle’s pace. Break the barrier to better conversion rates, contact Social Spice Media today! We offer website development packages, in addition to reliable hosting services, to ensure your business site is meeting your customers’ expectations.
And if you’d like to see if your website loading time is optimal, get started with our fast, free website audit.
