It is a generally accepted rule that if a web page takes longer than two or three seconds to load the website visitor will throw in the towel and never return. This is why speed optimisation has become an important element in modern web design and should not be overlooked. As a business, you don’t want potential clients and users to think negatively about your brand just because your website is slow. The importance of speed optimisation cannot be understated as it influences several key factors of online success:
Usability
The usability of your website will be directly affected by the load time, page speed and website responsiveness. These in turn will impact the loyalty of your customers as the better your website performs the more satisfied a user will be. Giving a customer an amazing user experience is a sure fire way of building a solid brand and large customer base.
Conversion
Website conversion is in essence how effective your site is at getting your users to do what you want them to. For example, buying a product, subscribing to a newsletter or downloading a guide. Web conversion is therefore an extremely important facet of web design. The faster a web page loads the higher the conversion rate it will achieve. In a study conducted by Hubspot, a delay of just one second results in a drop of seven percent in conversions. To put this into perspective, if a website such as amazon had a slow down of one second it would cost them one and a half billion dollars in sales a year.
Visibility
Load times directly correlate with the visibility of your website online and therefore how easy it is for a user to find your site. In fact website speed is one of the key attributes Google considers when ranking sites. A website that performs poorly and has a lack lustre user experience will not gain the same promotion in search results as a website that performs well and provides users with a great experience.
3 Top tips to improve your Speed
1.Image Optimisation
Images can be an in integral part of any website. This is nowhere more true than in the ecommerce industry as product images are an important feature that improve engagement on their site. However images can be large files that slow down a website. The best way to reduce file sizes for these images while retaining their quality is by compressing them. This may take some time but is worth it.
2.Reduce the use of web fonts
Although they have become a popular element in web design they unfortunately have a negative impact on the time taken for a page to render. They add extra HTTP requests to external resources. If you were to use modern formats WOFF2 for modern browsers, include only those character sets that are used on the site, or choose only the needed styles, then you’d see a remarkable improvement in website speed.
3.Use Website Caching
In the case where there are a lot of users accessing the web page at one time servers work slowly and need more time to deliver the web page to each user. Caching is a process of storing the current version of your website on the hosting in order to present this version until the site is updated, meaning the site doesn’t require to be rendered for every individual user. Cached web pages don’t need to send database requests every time.
In Summary, Speed, or in this case the lack of it really does kill a website’s success if not taken into consideration. If you’d like to chat with WebsiteNI about how we can help improve your online presence and ongoing digital marketing contact us via email or call us on 028 3754 9025 (Dungannon) or 028 9002 5050 (Belfast).
