You may be losing an opportunity to convert your potential customers into your loyal clients due to the slow speed of your website. It is highly frustrating to click on the website and wait for more than 3 seconds to load the page.
You will be flabbergasted to know the fact that a one-second delay in page load time yields:
- 11% fewer page views;
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction;
- 7% loss in conversions.
There is a lot to learn from the above-mentioned statistics. Being a site owner, you will have to work hard to get your website visible in Google’s eyes. The Google research concludes that:
“The average time it takes to fully load the average mobile landing page is 22 seconds. However, research also indicates 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.”
Hence, it is pretty evident from above facts that speed does not just affect the page views, it affects revenue too.
How to speed up your website and generate more customers and revenue
When it comes to increasing the speed of your website, there is a plethora of factors that influences how long each page on your site takes to load. Some of the factors are discussed in this article which goes as follows:
- Image Optimization
Image optimization is the backbone of high page speed as images increase the size of the page. Pages with a large number of images and other content can often end up being over 100KB in size resulting in being bulky and slow to download. Google has come up with a solution as mentioned below:
According to Google, 30% of the pages it analyzed could save over 250KB simply by compressing images and text.
It is a palpable fact that larger image will demand more time to load, hence compacting the size of the image files can decrease the loading speed by a huge margin. The best approach to deal with images is:
- Keeping the images in JPEG format.
- Edit or crop the images and then use them as thumbnails.
The above-mentioned process of image optimization is time-consuming, however following these steps will definitely boost up the loading speed of your website topsy-turvy.
- Minimize HTTP Requests
Marketers need to have at least a general understanding of what goes behind the website when any visitor surf your website.
- When a visitor visits a webpage, the web browser of that visitor sends a message to the web server that hosts the webpage that ‘they are trying to visit the webpage’.
- Hence, the server is requested to send the files containing the content for that site to visitor’s web browser.
- The sent files contain any sort of text, images, and multimedia that exist on that particular webpage.
This request is termed as an HTTP request. In nutshell, the HTTP request is the term for web browser sending a request for a file, and the server sending that file to the browser.
How HTTP request relates to page speed?
For single file available on your website, the browser is obliged to make a separate request to the server. Hence, if your website contains no or less number of files, then it won’t take very long to download the content on your website. However, having a lot of relevant files is a necessity of good websites. The real enemy is large, high-definition images present on the website.
What is the number of HTTP requests a website should aim for?
Although there is no magic number for the number of files your webpage should be reduced to, HubSpot suggests that one should aim for the number of files anywhere ranging between 10-30.
What will you achieve by minimizing HTTP requests?
Minimizing HTTP requests will have a great positive impact on your website and you will instantly observe the improvement in the website speed. Once you minimize the HTTP requests, you will see that the visitors are now visiting effortlessly, thereby decreasing the bounce rate of your website. Soon, you will definitely see a change in your Google ranking. Just decrease the quantity of things that are to be loaded on every page of your website and feel the change.
- Enable Browser Cache
You will never wish to annoy a visitor every time he visits the same page of your website because of high download time while loading a page. It’s a basic psychology that a visitor visits your website for the first time just for the purpose of research. Once you enable the cache, you can greatly reduce the time it takes for repeat visitors to load your website, thereby turning the visitor into a customer.
The basic working of browser cache
When a visitor visits any site, the components residing on the page that he visits are stored on the hard drive in a cache.
Next time, when he visits the site, his browser will initiate the page loading without sending another HTTP request to the server, thereby generating the same results at a much faster speed. Hence, it is always recommended to enable your website’s browser cache.
Hence, if you own a website or take care of your client’s website, it is advised to run a site’s speed test on Google’s provided tool.
Once the report is generated, spend some time looking through the site’s speed test result and figure out the issues that majorly impact the site’s load times. After detecting the issues, start working on the fixation phase of the parameters and bring the website back into a good shape to let your clients and visitors experience the fruitful results.
