Looking for professional tips on how to speed up your website? 1-second delay in page loading time can yield 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in client satisfaction, and a 7% loss in conversions.
A few additional seconds can significantly impact your ability to engage site visitors as well as make sales. Therefore, you need to ensure that your site not only ranks favourably on Google, but it is also fast.  One thing that you should keep in mind is that slow speeds reduces conversion rates.
How Website Speed Optimization Improves Conversions
Research indicates that 47% of Internet users expect websites that they visit to load in less than 2 seconds. 40% will look elsewhere if your page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Therefore, you are likely to lose nearly half of potential site visitors even before they land on your pages. That alone can be a significant blow if you are looking to improve conversions.
As for visitors who decide to stay on your web pages, slow load times can discourage them from returning in future. One survey established that up to 79% of Internet users pointed out that that cannot go back to a website that has slow load times. In the same study, 52% of shoppers indicated that quick page loading influences their site loyalty. Similarly, 44% are likely to caution their friends about websites with slow load times.
From the statistics, it should not come as a surprise that enhancing site speed can significantly improve performance. Anyone who runs an e-commerce store in Singapore will tell you that there is always a massive increase in conversion and sales whenever site speed is improved. Visitors who are likely to convert are those who typically visit sites that load faster.
Putting in place strategies to boost your site speed by even one second can have a significant impact on conversions. To put this into perspective, you have to look back to the time when Google endured a 20% decrease in traffic as a result of 5 extra seconds in loading time.
Amazon once piloted an A/B test, which entailed delaying pages for 100 milliseconds increments. In the end, it was established that even the slightest delays led to costly and substantial decreases in sales. Amazon and Google are perhaps two of the most recognizable and reputable websites. If users are not ready to wait an extra second for pages on these sites to load, they definitely won’t wait for your Singapore business website to load.Â
How Website Speed Impacts Visibility
When ranking websites, speed is one of the considerations that Google takes into account. Your load time has an impact on how Internet users can find you whenever they search for information online. This comes at a time when Google is implementing its mobile-first index. In recent months, the search engine has been ranking search results based on the performance of their mobile versions.
In 2015, desktop searches were outnumbered by mobile searches. Therefore, it is in Google’s best interests to ensure that mobile users are catered for in search results. Definitely, Google does not want to direct its users to websites that will not function or load properly on their mobile gadgets. This clearly indicates that the experiences of mobile users will play a significant role in desktop search results and search rankings.
For long, user experience was the primary determining factor in the ranking of websites. This is no longer the case since these rankings were only based on desktop experience. As a result, sites that provided visitors with a poor mobile experience could still be ranked favourably by Google. That is not the case any more since pages are currently ranked and indexed according to the experience that they provide to mobile users.
To maintain and even improve the visibility and ranking or your website, you should find a way of minimising its loading time. This will give you a site that can provide a quick and convenient user experience on different browsers and screen sizes.
What is the Suitable Website Load Time?
Before embarking on minimizing your website’s load times, it is advisable that you set objectives that will guide you towards where you want to be. This can be difficult, more so if you are not sure about the acceptable page speeds. Google recommends three seconds as the longest loading time. Unfortunately, a recent benchmark study showed that most websites have significantly longer load times.
A Google study incorporating 900,000 landing pages of mobile ads in different countries including Singapore established that nearly 70% of pages that were analysed took over 7 seconds for visual content to display. No industry had an average that is close to Google’s recommended loading time of 3 seconds.
On average, mobile landing pages take 22 seconds to load fully. Up to 53% of visits to these slow-loading sites get abandoned. This clearly shows that if you have slow loading pages, your company could be missing lots of business opportunities in Singapore and beyond.
You should work towards ensuring that your website is up to par with Google’s recommended best practices. While putting in efforts to improve your website, you should use Google’s benchmarks and recommendations to not only set your goals but also measure your performance.
By virtue of being the most widely used search engine, Google can significantly influence the success of your website. Therefore, it is not a bad idea to ensure that your standards are almost at par with the search engine’s recommended best practices.
How To Speed Up Your Website
There are dozens of factors that influence how long it takes for individual pages on your website to load. Consequently, there are several strategies that you can use in an effort to boost speed as well as improve users’ experience. The following tips will come in handy.
Reduce HTTP Requests
A significant amount of website load times is spent downloading various parts of web pages including scripts, style sheets, and images. HTTP requests are made for each of the elements. A higher number of on-page components means that your pages will take longer to load. Reducing the number of HTTP request will improve load time thus speeding up your site.
Deferring JavaScript Loading
When you defer a file, it simply means that you are stopping it from loading until other elements load. Deferring large files such as JavaScript ensures that other content can load without any delays.
Reduce Time to First Byte (TTFB)
Besides the time that your pages take to fully load, you also need to monitor the amount of time that it takes for the pages to start loading. TTFB is the time that browsers typically have to wait before they receive the first data byte from servers. Minimizing TTFB will see your site loading faster.
Minimize Server Response Times
Arguably, one of the factors that significantly affect how fast your website loads is the time lapse of your DNS lookup. If you currently use a slow DNS, it means that it takes long for your website to be located by browsers. Shifting to faster DNS will speed up your loading times.
Carry Out a Compression Audit
You should ensure that you have files in the smallest possible format without necessarily compromising quality. It takes less time for smaller files to load compared to larger files. With smaller files, your website will load faster. Pages with lots of content and images that are more than 100 KB are often bulky and consequently, load slowly. Compressing your files will go a long way in increasing download times.
Use a CDN
Beyond servers that host your website, there are other server networks that you can use to minimize load times. If your site is hosted on one server, it means that all your visitors will send requests to that server so that they can access your content.
Therefore, when your website experiences significantly high traffic levels, the amount of time that it takes to process each request made to your server increases. This will slow down loading times for all your visitors. Since high-traffic times present dozens of business opportunities to online business, having slow loading pages during such times can limit your growth potential.
A CDN can eliminate such issues since it will cache your website to a worldwide network of servers. Whenever users’ browsers request files from your website, the request will be routed to the nearest server rather than a single server.
Having page load times that nearly match Google recommendations can be a challenging task. We have a team of experts who can help you achieve that goal without compromising other elements of your website. Get in touch with us for more details about our website design and optimisation services.
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