6 Ways to Speed Up Your Website and Get Those Conversions Rolling

You didn’t prioritize your website’s speed because it is unimportant? Now your entire website is facing less or decreasing traffic with little to no user engagement and those high bounce rates have you pulling your hair?

Website Speed Optimization is the keyword that you and your development team should have paid special attention to. Why? Because even a second delay in page loading time will have you losing at least 7% conversions, an 11% decrease in page views, and about a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. Not to mention, all this will eventually lead to a sinking ranking on Google.

The worst situation to be in as a website and its owner.

The bottom line is – that no one likes a slow website or has the patience to deal with one. This is why if your website isn’t optimized for speed then you are bound to lose your place within search engines along with potential customers leaving your conversion graph a ‘curious case of drooping’; that unfortunately won’t bode well for your business if not treated immediately. This is why updating your website should include optimizing it for speed as well.

Let’s talk statistics

• 37% of the users bounce when the page takes 5 seconds or more to load.
• 70% of the online shoppers say that the site’s speed and its page loading time affects our purchasing decision.
• For sites that loaded within or less than 5 seconds observed 2 times more revenue.
•  52% of customers placed a quick loading page to be one of the reasons for their loyalty towards the site.
• 47% of people expect pages to load within 2 seconds or less (with 5G technology in place, it is expected of consumers to want faster and better website experience).
• Taking BBC as an example; they noticed a loss of 10% of their users for every extra second delay in their site loading time.
• Not leaving mobile visitors out; 90% of mobile visitors leave a website when the page loading time extends from 1 to 5 seconds. Similarly, a whopping 106% of mobile visitors abandon their website when the page takes around 6 seconds to load.

There is more to these statistics, as the data is extensive and solidifies the need for websites to take their page/site loading game several notches up and according to the set standards of Google if they want to beat their competitors.

So far we can come to the conclusion keeping the above data into consideration that the conversions depend on the page loading speed.

Where there is much at stake with high page loading times for website owners, there are effective solutions to combat the issue and we are here to help you with that.

Ways to Speed Up Your Website

You need to understand that website’s speed is part of user experience and since UX is a top priority for any business, you also need to make sure your website’s page loading speed doesn’t reduce the quality of experience.

There are several solutions that you can apply to improve the site speed, but not every solution may be applicable.

1) Reduce HTTP Requests

One of the reasons your page may be slowing down is because the loading time is spent on downloading the different elements of the page that usually includes the images, style sheets, and scripts on to the user’s mobile device or desktop.

This is why the concept of ‘less is more’ is advocated in UI/UX design so that your on-page elements can be reduced ultimately improving your page loading speed.

First find out how many HTTP requests your site is currently making and then holding that number as the marker try reducing the unnecessary images, multimedia, and other elements.

2) Clean-out Outdated or Unnecessary Plugins

Your WordPress website is supported by plugins that add so much more functionality to your site. However, considering the tremendous amount of plugins available, we tend to go overboard and add several that overtime becomes useless.

It is best to remove plugins that you no longer need or use. This will reduce the backup size that can become large due to the excessive amount of plugins installed.

3) Minify Files (CSS, JavaScript, and HTML)

Once you have the numbers regarding the HTTP requests being generated from your site, you can start remedy that by reducing the file sizes. These files include your HTML, JS, and CSS files.

The motive behind this is to reduce the overall site’s file size to fasten the loading speed. For this, you can start with the most important files that are responsible for the overall appearance of your site. The act of ‘minifying’ includes removing unnecessary formatting, white spaces, and code.

Another great thing you can do to your multiple CSS and JS files is to combine them into one. This entire process of minifying and combining the files will show significant improvement within your loading timeframe.

4) Use Asynchronous Loading of CSS and JS files than Synchronous

Once you have minified and combined the files as we spoke above, you can now control the way these files load on your pages.

There are two different ways CSS and JavaScript are loaded:

• Synchronously
• Asynchronously

As the names suggest in the synchronous loading, everything loads one at a time in order. This is time-consuming and loads pages slowly compared to the second option. Asynchronous loading on the other hand allows some of them to load simultaneously which speeds up the pages.

5) Conduct Site’s Database Cleanup

The database is an integral section of any website as it stores the images, articles, page layouts, and other information on your website. Your database if not regularly cleaned from unwanted information then you are looking at slow speed and a huge backup size.

This is why it is important that you remove spam comments, idle profiles, unrequired themes and plugins, and anything that doesn’t serve your website anymore.

6) Reduce Server Response Time

Server response time can be explained as the time that a server takes to process and respond to the visitor’s request. The process can be explained with these four steps:

1. Request: This is where you generate a request to access a website.
2. Response: The request is then taken into consideration and is processed. The necessary elements of the website that include the web page files and more are sent back to the visitor’s web browser.
3. Build: The web browser upon receiving the elements of the website starts rendering it.
4. Render The web page after being processed is finally displayed to the visitor.

Now that you understand the process of generating a request and the server processing the request and generating a response – we can move on to how can we speed up the response time of the concerned server.

• Upgrade your web hosting services: When you start receiving an influx of traffic, your server can exhaust itself by responding to all the incoming requests. This is why consider upgrading your web host service to a better one that is optimized to handle traffic surges.
• Reduce the distance between server and visitors: If your target audience is residing farther from your server then the time the data will take to travel will also increase affecting the response time; called latency. This is why it is imperative for you to choose the data center nearest to your target audience.
• Keep database well-managed: A database stores all sorts of information. It needs to be kept updated and managed, otherwise if it is containing garbage values and data then your site’s response time will go up.
• Dynamic Vs Static? Static websites that do not deal with external requests that require database access are faster to load. A dynamic website, on the other hand, is handling various incoming requests, and generating results accordingly have a longer server response time. However, dynamic sites can dump the static content on a WordPress CDN, so the main server is relieved of the pressure and has freed resources that can tackle the run-time generated queries.

Let’s Get Started!

By now you must have understood the need and many ways you can optimize your website for speed. So if you are searching for a tech partner that can no only develop a website solution for you but apply the best techniques to make it faster-keeping user experience as the top priority then KoderLabs, a software development company in Houston is at your service.