Is a Slow Website Costing you Sales?

Slow Website Awareness Check

Is a slow website costing you sales? Well, you’re not alone. Even the largest e-commerce sites experience the same. With too much competition available online, you don’t want to lose a customer who has grown impatient to your slowly loading website. To demonstrate, a 1-second delay causes 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, which may further lead to at least a 7% loss in conversions. Amazon reported 1% increased revenue for every 100-millisecond improvement in their site’s speed too. Walmart reported 2% increase in customer conversions for every 1 second of website speed improvement. So, how do they improve their website’s speed? Here are five steps to increase your page’s loading speed:

Reduce Redirects

Redirects creating additional HTTP requests increase your page’s loading time. However, it may be inevitable to have HTTP redirects, especially when redirecting mobile visitors from your main website to your responsive page. Google recommends using HTTP redirect to send mobile users directly to your page’s mobile equivalent URL without the need for redirects or using Google bots to discover your mobile-responsive page.

Reduce the Number of Plugins

While some may be useful, other plugins do nothing but slow your site’s loading time. Not only does it slow your page, but too many plugins also create security issues, crashes, and other technical difficulties. Try selectively disabling some plugins and monitor server performance to identify which among the plugins can be deactivated or deleted.

Optimize the Images Used

Images are useful contents to your website but you need to be detailed in optimizing their size, format, and src attribute. Avoid using an oversized image only to set the width parameter in the codes. The best format for faster loading speed is JPEG. Include source in the src attribute too because without it the browser will make a request to an external directory or within the actual page.

Enable Cache

Another way to improve your page’s speed is to allow cache or temporary storage of some elements of your website’s pages into your visitor’s browser. Cached elements reduced the number of HTTP requests needed for this page to load.

Improve Server Response Time

Utilize Google’s webmaster’s tools to improve your server response time. Try using a web application monitoring solution to pinpoint hiccups and bottlenecks of your site’s loading and display performance.

The bottom line for improving a website’s loading speed is minimizing HTTP requests. When you reduce redirects, plugins, optimize images, and enable caches, you reduce the need for your page for HTTP requests. Follow the first four steps, and then doing the last step should be easy. Do not lose another potential customer again for a slow-loading website.