Ways to Boost Conversion and Speed up Your Website

Despite reading constant articles about how much consumers love faster websites, and quicker shopping experiences, some companies still struggle to understand just how much speed matters to their online presence. A single second of delay in your speed time can lead to a 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views and a 16% decrease in the satisfaction of your customer. According to Akamai, up to 40% of all online browsers will leave a web page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Obviously, the speed of your website is critical to its success. So what exactly can you do to save valuable seconds in website speed?

• Reduce your HTTP Requests

Yahoo discovered that approximately 80% of the loading time of any web page is spent on downloading the various parts of the page, including style sheets, images, flash, scripts, and more. An HTTP request is something that is made for each of these factors, so the more components that exist on your page, the longer it will take for that page to render. Because of this, one of the easiest ways to enhance your site speed it to simplify its design.

Reduce the number of things popping up on your page at any given time, and reduce your scripts. Use CSS instead of images, and combine a number of different style sheets into one. Remember, the slimmer you can go with your website, the better.

• Cut down on Plugins

People love plugins. There are plugins that help you create a wider social media presence, plugins that can help you to check your SEO performance, and plugins that have no real value whatsoever. The important thing to remember is that too many of these gadgets can slow down your site significantly, causing crashes, technical difficulties, and even issues with security.

Try deleting any plugins that are not completely necessary. If you want to, delete one at a time and check the performance of your website. This way, you will be able to identify the plugins that are causing the most damage to your loading speed.

• Improve Server Response Time

Generally, the target for all websites should be to achieve a server response time of less than 200ms. If you are careful, you should be able to achieve this quite easily. Google recommends that marketers and businesses alike use a monitoring solution for their web applications so that they can analyze any issues with performance.

The tool provided by Google called “PageSpeed Tools” can be helpful in allowing you to learn more about the best practices for improving performance.

• Optimize Your Images

When it comes to using images on your website, there is a number of things you will need to be careful about. Although it is important to appeal to the visual aspect of your customer, remember to focus on format and size.

Large images take much longer to load, so it’s important to keep images as small as possible. Try using an image compressor to reduce your image size to the lowest acceptable level. You can also crop your images using our crop image tool to get smaller size images. If you have a website page that is 570px wide, you can resize or compress your image accordingly instead of simply loading up a 2000px wide image and expecting the website to do the resizing for you.

In regards to format, JPEG is usually the best option, however, PNG can also be quite useful, though some older browsers struggle to support it. GIFs should only ever be used for very small, very simple graphics, and for animated designs, and always stay far away from TIFFs and BMPs.

• Reduce the Size of Your Resources

Online resources have made it easier than ever for brands and companies to build a web page for themselves. However, sometimes, the messy code can slow down your website significantly. Every piece of unnecessary code adds to the overall size of your page, meaning that it is essential to eliminate any indentation, line breaks and extra spaces that could be having an impact on your performance.

According to Google, you can reduce your HTML by using a tool such as PageSpeed Insights to generate a completely optimized version of your code. Simply run the analysis against your current code page and use the Minify HTML rule.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, it’s worth noting that some of these tips will be easier to implement than others. However, it is important to put in a little extra time and effort if you really want your web page to lead to success. You can have the best product in the world, but nobody will end up purchasing whatever you have to offer if they can’t be bothered to wait for your website to load long enough to see the product in the first place.