When it comes to your website’s performance, loading time is vital. However, unless you know how this metric works—and the factors that affect it—it might prove challenging to improve it.Your web pages must load quickly and seamlessly to lower bounce rates and improve user engagement.A website that’s optimized for speed not only offers an excellent user experience but can also improve your search engine rankings.Are you looking to create tailored on-site experiences to convert more web visitors into customers and generate more sales? Then, schedule a customized strategy call with our team of experienced conversion experts today!
How Do Low Loading Times Lead to More Sales?
A fast-loading website isn’t a luxury—it’s mandatory. Consumers expect websites not to take more than 2 seconds to load. [1] And if consumers think your website takes too long to load, that may lead to severe problems. You should think of website loading time as a sliding scale, where sites that load faster reap maximum benefits, and every two seconds makes a significant difference.Low loading times mean an excellent user experience. Typically, the faster your site loads, the happier your web visitors will be. And when potential customers are happy and satisfied with a site, they’re more likely to buy what you’re offering.According to a report by Akamai Developer [2]:
- Even a 0.1-second delay in your website loading time can lower your conversions by 7%.
- A 2-second delay in website loading can skyrocket bounce rates to 103%.
- About 53% of mobile website visitors will abandon a web page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Your web pages loading times should be three seconds or less to increase your chances of generating more conversions. Anything more than that will increase bounce rates dramatically.
How Do I Discover What’s Slowing My Site Down?
When your website takes too long to load, it could be because of many things. Unfortunately, finding out the reason can be daunting if you don’t know where to start. Fortunately, there are quick and straightforward ways to determine what’s slowing down your site.The best way to discover what’s slowing down your site is to conduct a speed performance audit with Google’s PageSpeed Insights or use Google’s performance tool. However, if you’re on mobile, use the speed audit option because Google’s Chrome app doesn’t have the tool you’d need to check your site’s performance.
1. Using Chrome’s Performance Tool
This tool offers a visual representation of how long it takes to load your site’s images and files. This is technical, so use the speed audit method instead if you don’t have enough expertise.By determining how long assets take to load, you can see what’s slowing down your site. The important columns to look for are type, name, and waterfall. “Name” refers to the name of the file that’s loading, and it also includes the file type, such as script.js. “Type” is the type of file loading, including .js or jpg. Finally, a “waterfall” is a timeframe that shows when and how much time it takes for the file to load. The narrower the waterfall block is, the faster the loading time. From the waterfall, you’ll discover what’s slowing down your site. For instance, if the file loading in the waterfall isn't stopping the loading of other elements, then most likely it isn’t the issue that is slowing your site unless it’s pretty wide, which means it’s taking too much to load.
2. Speed Performance Audit
This is the best option for someone with no technical expertise to discover why their site takes long to load. To perform speed audits on your site, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights or GT Metrix. When using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, first open one of the speed testers and type in your site’s URL. Then, click Analyze and wait for the results.The results vary from website to website, but generally, they’ll show what areas you need to improve on your site to reduce your loading times.
How Do I Reduce Loading Time on Mobile?
Loading times are even more critical in the mobile version of your site. Mobile users often are on the go, so they have little patience for mobile websites that take a long time to load. So if you want to keep the attention of these users long enough to drive conversions and generate sales, you need to reduce the loading time on mobile devices.Here are five recommendations to improve the speed of your mobile website:
1. Reduce Redirects
Enabling redirects creates additional HTTP requests, adding other network round trips and substantial latency. Many responsible sites often redirect users from the primary site to the mobile version. However, Google recommends avoiding redirects altogether or using an HTTP redirect for your mobile users.
2. Combine Files Where Necessary
To optimize your mobile site for speed, combine files, such as JavaScript and CSS, where possible. For instance, if your web page uses 15 style sheets and can merge them into 1, you need to combine them. Think about things as template-specific and site-wide. So, you should have one site-wide JavaScript file for JavaScript that’s on every web page of your website and one template-specific JavaScript file for every web page template on your website. You can do the same for CSS to reduce your loading times.
3. Optimize the Rendering Order
Next, change the order in which things are requested to make your mobile site load faster. Just like there are steps you must complete in a recipe before you can carry out other steps, there’s a specific order that a mobile browser follows, which you must adhere to when building your web pages. That means you must prioritize essential items, such as the head tag, page content, and the basic layout of your web pages first, and delay less critical items. This will dramatically reduce your loading speeds and give your mobile users the confidence that other pages will load faster. Also, this gives users assets to evaluate while the loading process takes place.
4. Monitor Round-Trip Times (RTTs)
Just as redirects can significantly influence loading times, RTT can also adversely affect page loading efficiency. Fortunately, you can drastically cut down the number of HTTP requests by using CSS sprites to combine multiple images into a single image file and minify and combine CSS and JavaScript files.
5. Optimize Your Images
Unsurprisingly, the larger your images are, the longer your site and web pages take to load. Luckily, you can use image editing tools to scale your images appropriately instead of CSS. CSS results in images that are still large and take too long to load. To be AMP-compliant, you must assign all externally loaded resources, including images, to assign a predetermined size and position. By specifying height and width, your images will function as responsive page elements that meet the screen size requirements of the target mobile device.
Site Design and Loading Times
Many factors affect how long each web page on your website takes to load, and thus, there are many things you can do to lower your loading times and deliver a better user experience. We’ll now go over some best practices in web design to reduce your loading times.
1. Reduce Dependencies
Plugins may increase your loading times. However, this doesn’t mean you should avoid plugins altogether because some plugins such as social share plugins are a must-have nowadays. But it’s always crucial to check and see if there’s a better alternative to the plugin, including using a CMS that has built-in social share plugins.Although monitoring your site’s traffic metrics is wise, using multiple tracking tools is not wise because that may slow your site. Thus, if, for example, you’re using WordPress as your CMS, allow either Google Analytics or WordPress stats to run tracking scripts on your web pages, but not both.
2. Avoid Inline CSS and JavaScript Files
It’s a great practice to store your site’s CSS and JavaScript externally. That’s because when your web pages load, the browser caches these files externally, reducing the loading times on subsequent requests. In addition, storing your CSS and JavaScript files externally fosters easier website maintenance.
3. Enable G-Zip Encoding
Just like files on your laptop that you zip and compress to reduce the total size when transferring files online, you can zip heavy files on your site with G-Zip Compression. It saves bandwidth and reduces download times, ultimately reducing your website loading speeds. Of course, you need to configure your server to return zipped and compressed content to do this.
4. Minify CSS and JavaScript
Minification involves compressing the code by renaming various variables using shorter names to reduce the total size and subsequent loading times.
5. Reduce Cookie Size
Cookies store data that persists between requests. This data is used in every request and increases the loading times when it’s too big. So, by reducing the sizes of your cookies, you can reduce data size and ultimately reduce your loading times. To reduce your loading times, you must reduce the size of the cookies and eliminate any unnecessary cookies.
Final Thoughts
Getting your site and page loading times to where you want them is daunting. Still, it’ll have a drastic positive impact on your overall user experience, and it’ll ultimately improve your conversions, resulting in more sales.Also, it’s vital to note that all the tips we have discussed in this article can help you accomplish your website speed goals; however, you don’t need to execute all of them today.Take your time to look through your website speed audit results to discover issues that have a significant impact on your loading times. Then, focus on the high-impact factors and take the necessary measures to improve them.Do you want to convert more website visitors into customers by delivering exceptional on-site experiences? Schedule a customized strategy call with an experienced conversion expert at Ampry today!