Improve Conversions with a Faster Website
If you’re looking for a way to improve your conversions, there is one very obvious solution. A faster website could be precisely what you’re looking for ranking-wise. Who doesn’t want to be at the top of all the search engines? In fact, Zoompf and Moz conducted a research study to see how the speed of a website impacted search ranking. What they discovered was rather alarming. After all, it demonstrated no direct correlation between page load time and search ranking despite Google claims that speed did, indeed, matter.
Despite findings, a faster website does impact user experience which ultimately plays a role on search ranking going forward. If a page takes forever to load, a person may move onto another site out of frustration and there’s no way of recovering from a mistake like that. A fast page load time should be at the top of your To Do List when developing your website.
Research on Online Customer Revenue
In 2006, Amazon showed how delays in page load time affected sales. Each 100 millisecond delay cost the company a 1% loss. Intuit also reported significant increases in conversions just by decreasing their page load time. Increased speed led to high conversions with the highest being +3% for every second reduced from 15 seconds to 7 seconds.
Reduce Your Page Size
Although some people seem to think that bulky content is ideal, it can cause your site to take extra time to download. You use extra bandwidth which you get charged for and people grow increasingly impatient waiting for your site to come up. You can enable HTTP compressions and reduce the text resources your site is using. You can measure its efficiency by testing your URL and the JavaScript and CSS files included on your webpage. If compression is not an option, you can request that the server admin or provider host turns it on.
Don’t Let Your Browser Make Multiple Requests
Using less images, fewer JavaScript files, and fewer analytic beacons can increase how quickly your page responds to a request. A minimalistic approach can help you with conversions. Some other ways that you can improve your pages efficiencies is through browser caching, combining related JS and CSS files and small images into CSS sprites.
The Distance to Your Site Matters
Choose a host in your area. That will keep download times to a minimum. The further you are from your service provider, the longer it takes for images, JavaScript, and CSS to load. You can sign up for a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to ensure that things run more smoothly. By changing the URL of images, JS, and CSS, you instruct the browser to look for your image. The CDN provider returns the image from the network and save it for reuse at a later time. CDNs are ideal because they copy an image and route it to the closest available location quickly. This reduces load time, which pays a toll on reader and customer patience.
