Our Nashville web design group puts a big focus on speeding up the website. The importance is high because the speed of the site is directly correlated to the results the website will deliver. There are no shortage of articles out there about speeding up your website. The purpose of this one is to reiterate the importance of the speed and to discuss how a lack of speed could affect your results.
First, let me say we know this to be true. Our Nashville web design company has seen websites go from 10 seconds to three and the results skyrocket. One recent, quick example comes from a business owner who saw his website go from loading in four seconds to two. He said “our conversion rate is almost 38%”. The speed improved by 100% but notice it started at four seconds, not 10, or some obviously high number that would make this obvious.
We won’t rely on information only from our Nashville web design group. Let’s take Google at it’s word instead. Statistics show customers expect your website to load in under two seconds. This means when someone clicks on your website from the search engine results page, or SERP, you’ve got two seconds to load or they bounce back. This bounce back hurts your favor with the search engine, so it’s important. If your business thinks this is silly and feels your target audience is more patient, beware. Websites loading fast and the importance of it has become so common even patient people are trained to know a bad experience.
Should the customer land on your website, there are more speed factors to consider. Nashville web design’s best friend, uncle Google, says with every additional second the website loads, the likelihood the customer will bounce goes up about 12%. They define a bounce as someone hitting a page and leaving almost immediately. Imagine your website experience requires five to seven page views before a customer makes a decision. With a slow website, the probability the customer leaves continues to increase.
To back this up, Kissmetrics did a study showing that every second it takes for the website to load results in a decrease of conversion rate by seven percent. For a typical ecommerce website, five to seven pages are required. When you consider all the pages required, like the home page, an about page, a return policy page, category, product, cart, and then checkout, it’s not unrealistic. Based on this statistic, the difference in conversion rate between a website loading in two seconds and one taking five seconds to load is 21%.
Our Nashville web design group has many clients who have seen an increase in their website speed leading to an improvement in the conversion rate. One recent example, just taken this morning, shows a 25% increase in the conversion rate with a four second speed up over a 30-day period. Many more examples can be found online. Customers do not want to wait because they simple do not have to.
In most cases, improving the website speed isn’t a daunting task. Our Nashville web design group has worked with all kinds of websites and have seen many examples. Some sites are easier to get to the optimal speed than other, but almost all websites are easy for a professional with experience to speed up to some degree. In some cases, perhaps with simpler sites, a business can do it themselves. As we mentioned earlier, there are no shortage of articles out there. However, delegating to a professional who understands how to test the changes made on the website to ensure the improvement in speed isn’t causing other problems is important.
Several ways a business can improve the speed of their website are caching, optimizing images for the web, clean up the website code, move to a great hosting company, and use of a content delivery network, or CDN. We’ll briefly go through each of these and offer a few recommendations on how to achieve them. It’s also important to point out a few things to watch out for if you’re doing it yourself.
Caching is the equivalent of taking a picture of the website and delivering it to the customer later, rather than having to create that moment in time. Specifically, the HTML code is written without the use of the database and serverside language so the output can get to the customer quicker. Depending on the platform used to build the site and complexity of the website you can use a WordPress plugin like WP-Rocket or a Magento extension like Full Page Cache to get a head start. To fully maximize caching however, serverside caches like memcached, Redis, Varnish, and OpCache should be explored. These serverside caches will certainly require some technical expertise. But we have seen some significant improvements using on-page caching like the aforementioned solutions.
Optimizing images for the website is often a big way to get gains. An image is essentially downloaded when a customer visits the website so serving them in as small of a size as possible can be a great savings. Website browsers only read images at 72 dots per inch (or DPI) yet a camera often takes pictures at 300 DPI. That’s at least four times larger quality than the browser can receive. Additionally, the format of the image can add weight. For example, a PNG may offer more colors and a sharper image than a JPG but it may not be necessary. Today the modern browsers, like Google Chrome, allow a format called WEBP, which is substantially smaller than even a JPG.
Cleaning up the website code reduces inefficiency that slows the load down. Use of page editors bloats the code and generally makes it poor. Caching can only speed up poor code so much. However, moving to a great host that offers more serverside caching can really make a difference.
Be sure to test all important areas of your website if you decide to make improvements yourself. Use a new browser in incognito mode so that your browser cache isn’t showing an old version and hiding mistakes. Also be sure to log out to ensure the caching and changes are being shown. Finally, take care to test your email campaigns and advertising like Google and Facebook, as query strings can be cached and show your pages as broken. When in doubt, our Nashville web design group is here for a free consultation.