Simply put, the quicker a website performs and loads – the more clients and customers will navigate their way around the site; what is often termed as the website’s rate. The higher the rate, the better it is for everyone; especially the websites owner!
There a number of variables to consider as to why a website is not converting visitors into paying customers, but for the purpose of this blog, we can focus on website speed as a major factor in conversion rate optimisation.
GREAT WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITES SPEED
Improve website speed and you will see immediate results. Reduce image size as an example and see the bounce rates drop down. Your Google analytics will show these improved results. Sign up to Google analytics and get your web developer to pop this into your site for you – simple enough to do and measure.
Remove heavy wordy content – pages after page of information with graphs can have a real impact on the sites speed and download times. Keep information relevant and to a minimum. People have little or no time to trawl over too much on page content.
Old third party software could be slowing down your website. Conduct a site audit and get rid of unnecessary databases of code that is no longer in use.
Are you hosting your website in Australia? Hosting companies and providers can have a massive influence over web speeds. It just might be time that you upgrade your web hosting package to include extra space – this can be a quick win for you and have a drastic impact over your websites speed. It may cost you a bit more but its overall affect is well worth the dollars spent!
Have a chat with your web developer and see if they have any ideas or ways to streamline your current site. In many cases it could be a minor fix or tweak – make that call and get it happening. A good web developer should be able to look at your site and make some immediate suggestions. In fact you can probably look at it yourself and come up with a few good ideas – essentially it's all about getting it to load quicker.
TIMINGS FOR WEBSITE SPEED
Certainly, nobody is going to stick around for 10 seconds waiting for a web page and certainly not a whole website as they trudge around trying to make a purchase with you.
Load times can vary based on the size of the website. But a good measure which Google tells us about is that a website speed should be less than three seconds to load. If it takes longer than that then you are going to see a massive bounce rate and online users dropping off the site.
I know that if I have to wait more than 2 seconds I start to get impatient. So all up a good guide is between 2- 3 seconds.
These figures are particularly important if you have a eCommerce website – you need people to make that purchase and slow inefficient sites are just going to hamper this process.
Statistics released by a credible IT magazine shows that for every extra second that a site needs to load, results in 13% of users dropping off. This percentage increases exponentially as load times increase
Speedy websites that are fast on the information and quick on the check out process will improve overall shopping cart abandonment rates.
Remember this – no one and I mean no one will stick around and wait for each page to download – this is a 100% guaranteed!
At Hopping Mad Designs we get calls for this all the time.
We have people calling us up and saying that their website is not loading fast enough and customers are deserting the website in big numbers. They have a great product or a really awesome service but people are not sticking around long enough.
More often that not this is a very quick fix and something that has an immediate impact – its amazing to see that with just a couple of site fixes how the whole web experience changes.
Ideally, this should be a continual process – site speed is only one factor in the overall success of your website – content, images, site layout and about 100 other factors need to be taken into account.