In order to establish a successful online business just having a website is not enough. In order to attract customers your website should be interactive and user friendly, but above that it should load fast. Nobody likes waiting and users are likely to close your website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds or less. If your website takes a lot of time to load then the visitors will abandon it without even having a look at your products and services. Basically, the load time of your web pages will decide whether the website visitor will explore your site or part ways with it. If you lose out on page views and traffic then it is natural that your businesses’ ROI and conversions will also get affected. Apart from all these major side effects, a slow loading web page also hampers the SEO, the user experience and your brand image.
Here are a few statistics that prove how slow loading web pages mess with ROI, Conversion rates, SEO, User experience and brand image –
- 47% web users expect a site to load in 2 second or less.
- 40% web users abandon a website that doesn’t load within three seconds.
- 79% visitors who face trouble while shopping from ecommerce sites say that they won’t return to shop from the site again.
- 44% of these will tell their friends about their poor shopping experience on the particular site.
- If an ecommerce site makes $100,000 per day, a 1 sec page delay could mean loss of $2.5 million each year in sales.
Let us have a look at 9 ways that can reduce the load time of pages and increase your website’s speed by a large magnitude –
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for faster loading web pages
Every business owner nowadays is stressing on improving the load time of his web pages. Business owners have become more focussed on this part especially after Google introduced its framework – Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which improves the load times of mobile web pages. You might have seen that in mobile web pages, static content takes an awful lot of time to load. Even after the text comes to display the pages still keep on loading the images and the ads. This provides an unpleasant experience to the users as the position of text keeps on shifting. But with the implementation of AMP HTML into the current HTML pages of the site, this problem can be solved. AMP enables the publishers to improve the speed of their web pages without compromising on the Ad revenue. Further, it improves your SEO and also brings organic traffic to your website. Google also says that page experience is the key element of your landing page experience and has a greater impact on your Adword quality score.
Optimize caches
Ensure that your mobile browser uses local memory to cache resources. This will avoid unnecessary server request and improve the load time of the pages.
Trim down JavaScript parsing
Parsing of JavaScript by mobile browsers increases the load time of the pages. You can optimize the page load time of your mobile web pages by deferring the parsing of unnecessary <script> tags.
Do away with redirects
Redirects usually require extra processing time. If you serve the mobile site to the users directly, it will drastically improve your website’s speed.
Minify JavaScript and Style sheets
Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code without changing its functionality. Minification of all JavaScript and Style sheets on your mobile site shall reduce the overall bandwidth consumption and improve mobile caching.
Apply CSS3 and HTML5
CSS3 and HTML5 frameworks are lightweight, due to which the web pages load quickly.
Minimize Image size
You can minimize the image size to reduce the average page load time. Optimizing and resizing images leads to the pages opening quickly. High resolution images are heavy and absorb more bandwidth and as a result take longer time to load. You should keep your images under 100kb to achieve ideal page load time for your website.
Apply AJAX
Applying AJAX shall help your mobile site fetch data from a web server without essentially requiring the page to be refreshed. It will allow your mobile site to load faster and fill in updated content while the viewer is still browsing through your mobile page.
Use content delivery network
A content delivery network is a system of distributed networks that deliver web pages and web content to a user, based on his geographical location. You can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Amazon Cloudfront to reduce the page load time. Access to a faster server near the geographical location of user ensures a faster loading time of web pages.
Always remember that faster loading pages not only make your users happy but also decrease your bounce rate, and increase your conversion rates by great folds. So contact Queppelin today if you want us to build a super-fast responsive website for your business.