Is your website speed fast enough to capture the attention of customers?
Are you willing to bet the success of your business on the amount of traffic it generates?
The truth is, nearly half of all internet users will simply give up on a website that takes over three seconds to load. That’s not an exaggeration at all. Even a delay of just one second in page response time can have a negative impact on your conversion rates.
Standing out online is already tough, with millions of well-established blogs occupying the biggest niches around. On the other hand, your competition is easy to find among search results, so potential customers will be browsing their stores as well.
Online shoppers just don’t have the patience to deal with poor user experience. Therefore, you need every edge you can get or else you will see higher bounce rates from visitors alone.
Here are the three actionable steps that can improve your site speed and steadily grow your business:
Optimize Your Images for Web Performance
High-resolution images are the key to creating a positive user experience. But implementing them isn’t as easy as it sounds when you end up making some common, devastating mistakes.
In terms of file size, images are often the largest part of a webpage. This means that they can have a noticeable impact on page load times. Far too many sites force their users to wait for huge image files to display, relying on HTML or CSS values to shrink their dimensions after the fact.
You can cut down on the kilobytes of data transmitted between loading media, by cropping images to their correct display size or scaling them in proportion to the screen size, especially when using responsive design to adjust your visuals. Another method is to install a plugin like reSmush.it to compress your image file size.
You’ll also want to check that images are formatted in a mobile-friendly fashion and won’t cause display issues on smart devices. (JPEG and PNG files are usually safe choices.)
Cut Down on URL Redirects
Responsive design, in which the layout and elements of your website adjust depending on the device’s screen size, seems to be found everywhere these days. Until recently, the most popular solution for serving both desktop and mobile users was to create a mobile-specific, redirected version of the entire website.
The problem is, too many redirects elicit back-and-forth reloads between servers and your site visitors. It also increases page load time and makes for a subtly frustrating experience that can drive away potential customers and send them flocking to your competitors.
Any website that receives frequent updates can pile up additional redirects over time. Also known as chaining, this process forces Google to crawl through more outdated URLs. Even if your site already takes advantage of a responsive UI, it’s worth exploring whether your users are being served in the most efficient way.
Conducting an SEO audit will help you identify speed bottlenecks and ultimately create a better, more encouraging experience for your target audience. If it’s not enough, then you can still reduce data storage capacity in exchange for website speed using an SEO strategy called caching.
Try to Limit Your Use of Plugins
If your website is built on WordPress, Drupal, or any other content management system (CMS), then you’re probably quite familiar with plugin modules. Even sites built from scratch have access to tons of importable packages that add functionality but increase data transmission rates and page loading times.
Plugins can be great: They have the potential to solve common issues and make your website more visually appealing. Many web designers like to experiment with them, to introduce powerful customization options.
And yet, too many active ones will slow down your website noticeably, causing it to crash or even open up security loopholes for hackers to exploit. Instead, you should spend some time reviewing the plugins/add-ons you’re using and delete any that are deemed unnecessary.
You can always disable plugins one at a time, testing your site’s performance after each one, to identify which plugins have the worst impact on refresh times. An in-depth inspection lets you accomplish more with less, by removing plugins with limited tools and replacing their functionality in alternative ways.
Do these tips actually increase site speed?
Not all of these tips will be applicable to every situation, but understanding what contributes to your particular slowdowns is definitely worth the effort. Optimizing your website’s speed is an ongoing process in which you monitor the results after making a few adjustments. Rinse and repeat.
Even a tiny reduction in page load times can have a measurable long-term impact on conversions. Do take into account the three critical limits of loading time, from 0.1-10 seconds in which you should strive to keep the user engaged on your site content.
If you manage to incorporate these quick-and-easy tips, then you’ll be attracting new leads in no time.
