A recent study by E-consultancy has revealed that a simple 1 second delay in your site loading speed could reduce your conversion rate by up to 7%. With every one second delay in your site loading speed,you’ll experience a 7% decrease in conversion rate; if your business is budding and you’re making little sales, this might not seem like much but it becomes very significant when you’re a massive e-commerce business.
Some other findings Outlined in the Study were:
- 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
- 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
- 52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site.
- 14% will start shopping at a different site if page loads are slow, 23% will stop shopping or even walk away from their computer.
- 64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will go somewhere else to shop next time.
- 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.
By taking a look at the above findings, it becomes instantly clear that not only will having a slow website result in poor conversion rates, it can also lead to permanent loss of customers who will start telling others about their negative experience.
Here are 5 effective ways to make your Website Faster:
1. Ensure You Have the Right Website Setup
This is perhaps the most important point in this article. If you can get this right, then the other points won’t be much of a problem.
When creating your website, it is important to make sure that everything is in place; this includes your domain name provider, your hosting provider, your content management system (CMS) and the essential plugins required to help your blog work effectively.
Sometimes, the sole reason for the slow speed most website owners experience is because of their web host; in other words, if you have the wrong web host, there’s little to nothing you can do to make your website faster besides changing your host.
2. Enable Caching on Your Site
Every time someone visits your website, a new request is sent to your server which eventually adds to the time it’ll take for your site to load depending on the number of requests. New requests are created by each person on each visit, even if they keep accessing the same page.
By enabling caching on your website, you can ensure that only one request is made to your server per page visited on your website; so when someone tries to visit a page on your website, unless there has been an update, they’ll be shown the same page.
If you’re using WordPress, a plugin can easily solve this problem. Two popular WordPress plugins you can use are:
- WP Super Cache
- W3 Total Cache
3. Limit Use of Images on Your Website
When someone tries to visit your website, their browser will download everything on the page they’re trying to visit and then render it to them; some of the things that will be downloaded are text, images, fonts etc.
No matter how long the text on a page is, it is going to be considerably small compared to an image. So, the more images you use on your website, the more a user’s browser has to download and the slower their visit to your website will be.
By limiting the number of images on your website, though, you can ensure a faster web experience for most of your visitors.
If you really need to use images, then you might want to consider optimizing them and removing unnecessary data from them, so that their size is significantly reduced, before you upload them to your website.
Two recommended tools for optimizing your images are:
- Yahoo! Smush.it
- Image Optimizer
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is a network of servers designed to deliver your content to people trying to access your website from different parts of the world by giving them access to your website through the server nearest to their location.
In other words, if someone is trying to access your website from Greece, the version of your website hosted in Greece or nearest to Greece will be served to them. The same thing goes for people trying to access your website in India or the US.
With this approach, the good news is that you don’t have to purchase a server in all these locations. A CDN will handle everything for you automatically.
5. Limit Addons/Plugins/Widgets Usage on Your Website
The more plugins and widgets you use, the more requests will be made to your server whenever someone tries to visit your website.
By limiting the number of plugins/addons/widgets you use on your website, you’re also limiting the number of requests made to your server and as a result making the experience of visitors to your website a faster one.
Joseph is a marketing website who writes for Easy WebContent, one of the top tools online for creating beautiful websites.