Load Speed is Crucial to a Website’s Success

Load Speed is crucial to a website’s success. Has your business invested employee hours and capital into assuring that your website contains both appealing content and dynamic, attention-getting graphics? All of the effort you put into your website will be for naught if it doesn’t load fast enough. We live in a time where people’s attention is fragmented, so load time has to be exceedingly fast.  Recent studies have shown that almost half of all website visitors assume a site will load no longer than two seconds.  Other studies that support the two-second visitor expectation revealed that over half of users would bounce if it takes more than three seconds to load. Most potential customers will not return to your site if they left because it loaded too slow. This issue can have a significant negative impact on a company, especially if its main business is e-commerce based. A visitor who goes to a site to buy a product has an expectation that the transaction will be fast and uncomplicated. The same expectations apply to things such as digital downloads.  If you have a video, you want the customer to watch, seeing that it is buffering means they won’t.

Inconsistency Kills Conversions

If you fix how fast the site’s homepage loads, but didn’t do the same with the product pages, it is equally as frustrating to potential customers. You can count on wants to purchase your goods or services, but it takes only five seconds for a product page to load, they will leave. There is more than just losing a sale when it comes to bounce rates. Google’s crawlers see a high user bounce rate as a warning that your content is low quality, or it does not match the title.  You can also count on your search engine results page (SERP) ranking with Google and Bing dropping.  Lower SERP not only hurts your bottom line but your branding efforts. It also will take time to gain the favor of search engines again.

Go Faster

Here are some ways that can increase your site’s speed, which will increase your conversions.

Are You Slow?

Test your site’s load speed to see precisely how swiftly it loads. There are several tools to test your sites speed like GTmetrix.com, Google Pagespeed Insights, and Pingdom, which will give analytics on your site’s speed.

Crack the Code

If your site’s code contains a lot of spaces and unnecessary characters, it will slow the site down. Get rid of unnecessary spaces and characters to improve your site’s speed without impacting function. Use tools that compress for HTML and CSS for the procedure of “minification.”

Optimization Will Improve Speed

Images that are massive and lengthy videos can bog down a site significantly.  After you have reduced the image and video size, your webpage will load quite a bit faster.

Too Many Downloads

If a visitor has an interest in a particular product or service, don’t include everything your company produces or does on one page. Too many image files that take forever to load mean slower load times. The visitor may not even scroll down to see the hero images that pre-loaded. Use a web design tactic known as “lazy loading” as an alternative.  It will save resources by loading just the images and text that the customer needs.  WordPress features lazy loading plugins like Infinite Scroll that will load content while the visitor scrolls down the page. If you have an online store, there are also lazy loading plugins for e-commerce platforms like the highly popular WooCommerce.

In Conclusion

If your company does its due diligence and uses common sense, you can improve your company site’s load time and start turning visitors into customers.

For more information on how Incend Media can help you contact us today.

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