Slow Loading Time Kills Conversion Rates. Here’s Why!

There is a direct link between slow page speed and poor website conversions. Come to think of it, what would you do when you click on a website, and it takes ages to load? Exactly, you would click the next one. Since there is no dearth of information on the internet and an array of choices is present in front of your audience, it is your responsibility to give what the users want.

So, what do they want? People on the internet don’t have time to wait for you. You have to make them stay. If your website doesn’t have a fast-loading speed, your audience will bounce faster than you can even think of, increasing your conversions.

Loading Speed Can Either Make or Break Your Website

Your audience would feel stress-free and in command when pages load in just a second. However, after 10 seconds, you can barely sustain their attention. This leads to a bad user experience, and they would ultimately feel reluctant to return to your website. Just remember one thing, every second is essential when dealing with the users. With every second that passes, the user's patience decreases, and your bounce rate increases.

With a high bounce rate, you are allowing search engines to gobble down your rankings. Why? Well, the higher the bounce rate, the more irrelevant you become to the search engines. And the more irrelevant you appear on search engines, the lower your ranking gets. As simple as that!

Even the most well-known brands are not spared from the detrimental effects of website speed. For every added second it requires for the BBC's page to load, it sheds 10% of its viewers. And when Yahoo! slashed the time, it took for a page to render by merely 0.4 seconds, traffic rose by 9%.

Did You Know?

• One-fourth of your visitor is likely to abandon your website and look elsewhere if the loading speed takes more than 4 secs.

• You risk losing 46% of the user base as they are the ones who won’t revisit a poorly functioning and slow website.

• You must know the importance of every second. Just a one-second delay will eventually cut customer satisfaction by 16%. Time and audience wait for none.

Speed is King: Tips to Improve Your Page Speed

Compress and Optimize Your Images

Images enrich the richness of your content while also improving the aesthetics of your web pages. Large photos, on the other hand, can cause loading times to be delayed.

As a result, compressing and optimizing your images is one of the simplest ways to improve page loading times. Modifying their file types, enabling slow loading, and downsizing photos using lossy or lossless compression are examples of this.

When it comes to your images, you must learn when to utilize the correct file type. Changing the data format of a picture can significantly reduce its file size.

• GIFs are suitable for pictures with a limited color palette, such as logos.

• JPEG works well with images that have a lot of colors and textures, such as photographs.

• When you require high-quality transparent graphics, PNG is the file type to choose

Reduce Your Redirects

A website with several redirects can significantly slow downloading speed. Primarily, when 301 redirects are implemented, it drives the browser to a new domain that results in high page-loading times.

Of course, redirects are sometimes essential, such as when transitioning to a different domain. Getting rid of unintended redirects on your website, on the other hand, can result in much faster page loading speeds.

In WordPress, there are a couple different approaches to reduce redirection. One is to avoid making any that aren't relevant while developing inbound links and menus. Another thing to check is that your Top-Level Domain (TLD) connects with only one redirection.

Cache Your Webpages

Caching is one of the most efficient strategies to make your web pages load faster. The process involves saving copies of your site's contents on the server. Now, this static content model gets displayed in front of the user rather than recreating the same information at every request. It then reduces the time it takes for the server to build and deliver a web page to a user's device.

By enabling the server to spend limited bandwidth to load a site, caching your web pages can reduce the Time to First Byte (TTFB). Caching your web pages can be done in a variety of ways. This can be done at the server level, which means your host will take care of it or by using a plug-in.

Minify CSS, HTML, JavaScript Code

Page loading time can be enhanced by adjusting the way your files are handled. Decreasing your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code can also help. To cut the volume of the contents, you can delete extraneous spaces, characters, comments, and other non-essential parts.

It's also easier to integrate files when their sizes are less. The end effect is cleaner code and faster loading web pages.

Of course, going through each piece of code for every single one of your site's files isn't the most effective way to go.

As a result, you can use a free plugin to minify your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.

Leverage a Content Delivery Network

A Content Delivery Network (CDN), sometimes known as a "content distribution network," is a collection of servers that operates in tandem to optimize page loading times. It accomplishes this by promoting and providing static content versions from servers all over the world.

Minimizing the distance between the data requests traveling across browsers and your host's facilities improves the performance. A CDN reduces response time and lowers TTFBs by retrieving information for a website from a server proximate to each user.

Now, Skyrocket That Speed!

When it’s about page speed vs. SEO effectiveness, the former is more important than the latter.

The way users interact with your site has an impact on your rankings. This is why a digital marketing agency would monitor your page speed frequently and seek solutions to resolve any detected issues.

You should never ignore your website’s page speed metric to ensure an optimal user experience that eventually goes a long way in building a positive persona on the web!