{"id":3199,"date":"2016-03-29T14:47:03","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T09:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogbrandz.com\/tips\/?p=3199"},"modified":"2024-05-12T15:32:50","modified_gmt":"2024-05-12T10:02:50","slug":"page-load-time-conversions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogbrandz.com\/tips\/page-load-time-conversions\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Optimize Page Load Time And Increase Conversions"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Is your website loading slowly? Optimize page load time and increase page load speed and conversions with these page load optimization tips.<\/em><\/p>\n

A site that takes ages to load drives its visitors off, not knowingly but unknowingly. You might use social media or other resources to push up conversions<\/a>, but all efforts will end in vain if the load time isn\u2019t up to the snuff.<\/p>\n

Users love websites that load fast despite being laden with images and videos. So, is it possible to offer users a fast browsing experience?<\/p>\n

Yes, it\u2019s possible. There are tips for reducing page load time. But before we discuss them, let\u2019s have a full grasp of how page load time impacts conversion rate. After all, all online activities are aimed at only one goal – conversion.<\/p>\n

The factsheet<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I don\u2019t want to start with speculations. We\u2019ll have ample time to speculate later. I\u2019d like to start with some facts and stat figures that shed light on the interconnectedness between load time and traffic conversion.<\/p>\n

#Fact 1<\/strong>: For a normal website, a delay of just one second can result in a 7% drop in conversion rate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

#Fact 2<\/strong>: For an e-commerce website that makes $3 million a month from sales, a 1-second delay translates to the loss of a staggering $2.5 million over a year.<\/p>\n

#Fact 3<\/strong>: A company of Amazon\u2019s stature could lose $1.6 billion<\/a> in sales revenue over a year if there\u2019s a delay of only one second.<\/p>\n

The facts stated above validate the age-old aphorism that says every second counts in business. Page loading time makes a big-time impact on conversion rate and ensuing sales.<\/p>\n

\"convert<\/a><\/p>\n

The risk index<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Business sites are more at a risk compared to non-business sites. Sites that are primarily content-based (blogging or how-to types) don\u2019t lose business if a page loads slowly.<\/p>\n

Those sites lose visitors, but a business site loses money. Now you might say the two are the same as blogging sites cash out on visitors.<\/p>\n

True, but cashing out on visitors is a complicated process whereas customers are a direct source of money. Hence, content-based sites may be granted some clemency.<\/p>\n

A business, however, can\u2019t afford to have a slow-loading site. Most business sites have numerous pages, and e-commerce sites have dynamic effects along with multimedia elements and tons of images, which slow them down.<\/p>\n

Hence, for all sites out there that let users complete a checkout process while they are logged in, it\u2019s imperative to improve the loading time. How this can be done is what we are going to discuss here shortly.<\/p>\n

Reward index<\/strong><\/h3>\n

For a business site, offsetting the risks shouldn\u2019t be the only motivation as the rewards that come with a fast-loading site are colossal. See the image below:<\/p>\n

\"Reward<\/p>\n

Source<\/em><\/p>\n

A loading time drop of just 2.2% culminated in 10 million extra downloads. Firefox is not an e-commerce brand, and the activity performed in this example was download, not checkout (although both checkout and download qualify as CTAs).<\/p>\n

Since downloading Firefox is free, 10 million downloads don\u2019t look startling enough. Had it been an online store, the number would have been cut to half or maybe just a quarter.<\/p>\n

Now one-quarter of 10 million is 2.5 million. Imagine that many buyers are purchasing from the store. If I were the store owner, Id has filed for IPO after this (Pun intended).<\/p>\n

For B2C companies that depend on the internet to sell stuff, even an ounce of load time drop may result in the loss of millions in sales revenue.<\/p>\n

Loading time, as it seems, is just; it does both harm and good in equal measures, just as I said in the beginning that it can make or break a website.<\/p>\n

Load-time and other parameters<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Below is a graphic representation of how changes in loading time helped Walmart to ramp up its conversion rate:<\/p>\n

\"Load-time\"<\/p>\n

Brands have managed to quantify the loading time\u2019s impact on conversion rate<\/a>. This shows there\u2019s more to the correlation between the two. For a converted shopper, the pages, especially the landing page, load two times faster than for a shopper who is not converted.<\/p>\n

See the image below:<\/p>\n

\"loading<\/p>\n

Source<\/em><\/p>\n

The image below shows how bounce rate and loading time add up:<\/p>\n

\"bounce<\/p>\n

Source<\/em><\/p>\n

Landing pages that register a high bounce rate load slower than those that register a low bounce rate. The gap between them is 9 seconds. As millions can go down the drain because of a 1-second delay, a 9 seconds gap is huge.<\/p>\n

Note the above findings are from 2012. Four years ago shoppers had more patience and a longer attention span.<\/p>\n

Handheld and M-commerce<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Those who access the internet from handheld devices strongly dislike slow-loading sites. When something takes time to load, they get pissed.<\/p>\n

Mobile users have everything but patience because the handheld interface is more intuitive than the standard desktop interface (Swiping up, down, right, and left and tapping on icons, that\u2019s all it takes), users want everything to load in seconds.<\/p>\n

The majority of mobile shoppers are millennials, and they value the experience<\/a> besides the product. The scale at which mobile was used for e-commerce has increased rapidly, and now we have M-commerce or mobile commerce taking over the e-commerce segment.<\/p>\n

An e-commerce site that loads slowly pushes visitors to abandon the checkout process. Loading time is a pressing concern on the handheld platform because the checkout process is already plagued by several usability issues.<\/p>\n

A slow load time adds to it and we have a huge number of mobile shoppers turning their back on e-commerce brands.<\/p>\n

Improvement tips<\/strong><\/h3>\n

We\u2019ve discussed how page load time affects conversion rate<\/a> and how sales margin goes up and down depending on it.<\/p>\n

How to improve the load time? Here are some tips:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Image compression<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    The larger the image, the longer it takes to load. Webmasters know this and they scale down large images before uploading them on their sites. But that doesn\u2019t solve the problem as the browser loads the images at their original size.<\/p>\n

    Compressing images can help overcome this problem. As compressed images are optimally sized, the browser doesn\u2019t exert to display the images, and the site loads fast.<\/p>\n

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      \n
    • CSS optimization<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      Webpages often load slowly because of CSS files. The longer it takes users to download those files, the longer the duration of the hold-up. Optimizing the CSS reduces the loading time.<\/p>\n

      One way to optimize the files is by consolidating two or three of them into one, and here’s how to do that.<\/p>\n

      Following are codes for external CSS files, scattered and not combined:<\/p>\n

      <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text\/css” href=”\/header.css” \/><\/p>\n

      <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text\/css” href=”plugins\/menu-bar\/menu-bar.css”><\/p>\n

      If the files are consolidated into a single file containing the styling information, the site will load fast enough. Something like this:<\/p>\n

      <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text\/css” href=”\/style.css” \/><\/p>\n

      This is a simple, yet effective technique to speed up a website. Another simple CSS hack is putting the CSS on the top of a document and JavaScript at the bottom.<\/p>\n

        \n
      • Use browser caching<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

        This technique is for repeat visitors. As a brand, you\u2019ll want a loyal customer base. For that, you need to have thousands of repeat visitors. The clever way to speed up the site when it is visited by those folks is to enable browser cache.<\/p>\n

        What\u2019s the point of doing that? Through browser caching, you can save data on the visitor\u2019s computer when he visits the site next time. The storage is temporary, its benefit is visitors don\u2019t have to wait for the entire site to load.<\/p>\n

        The duration of the storage depends on two things; one is the configuration of the browser and the other is the cache settings of the server. In case you need resources to leverage browser caching, here\u2019s one<\/a>. Follow the guidelines there and your site will load faster.<\/p>\n