A website can be your greatest marketing asset or hindrance. Once you have a bold website structure, the most reliable indicator of lost leads can be traced back to page load time. Each second in increased page load time leads to 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% loss in conversions.
To compare your site’s loading speed against your major competitors, load all of them into WhichLoadsFaster and aim to be the fastest of the bunch. Or you can use this generalized grading scale to test your pages:
A less than a second
B 1-2 seconds
C 3-5 seconds
D 5-7 seconds
F 7+ seconds
If you find your website isn’t making the impression you’d like, here are some strategies to improve page load time.
Do a Compression Audit
Pages with several images and other content can sometimes reach into 100KB in size with long load times. But compressing your files to the smallest they can be without sacrificing quality will decrease wait time for your audience. A compression audit with GIDNetwork can tell you whether the webpage is already compressed, how much room compression is saving you, and an analysis of how much download time you could be saving if you were to employ Gzip compression.
Reduce Redirects
Each time a page redirects to another page, your website visitor faces additional time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete. For example, if a user types “example.com” into their mobile browser, which then redirects to www.example.com to m.example.com to ultimately end up at m.example.com/home, each of those two additional redirects elongate page load time.
While 301 (permanent) redirects are preferable to 404 page not found errors, reducing the number to a bare minimum will improve user experience. Screaming Frog is a great tool to crawl your website and spot unnecessary redirects for you to remove.
Minify and Combine Files
If your site uses several plugins available on the marketplace, it’s likely that your speeds are being impacted by inefficient JavaScript or CSS files. This is especially common for WordPress and other content management systems that provide a lot of flexibility to their users. The first way to do this is simply by combining all of your JavaScript files on a given page into one.
You can minify your files even further by deleting white space, errant commas and other unnecessary formatting within the code. If you are a WordPress user, WP Super Minify is a plugin that can do this automatically for you. For other content management systems, Google recommends using CSSNano for CSS code, Minify Code for HTML and UglifyJS for JavaScript.
Taking the time to diagnose a business website and get to the bottom of its long load times may seem daunting, but these tools can simplify the process and increase your website’s conversion rate while saving you time in the long run.
