As technology improves, we have become less patient. Today, we expect to find the information we’re looking for in seconds. We want websites to load quickly, regardless of which device we’re using, and if they don’t, we will leave.
Just how impatient are we? According to Kissmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less and 53% of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, if your website is too slow, it’s costing you money.
When you increase website speed on your site, not only does it allow for a good customer experience, it can also increase engagement and conversions on your website.
Here are some interesting case studies to back up these findings from Google, Pingdom and Doubleclick:
In 2016, Ancestory.com recorded a 7% positive rise in conversions after improving the render time of web pages by 68%, reducing page bloat by 46% and reducing load time by 64%.
In 2016, A presentation by Ali Express claimed they reduced load time for their pages by 36% and recorded a 10.5% increase in orders and a 27% increase in conversion rates for new customers.
In 2016, Artificial latency added to the Telegraph resulted in page views dropping by 11% for a 4s delay and 44% for a 20s delay.
In 2016, The Trainline reduced latency by 0.3s across their funnel and revenue increase by an extra £8 million a year.
In 2016, Instagram increased impressions and user profile scroll interactions by simply speeding up their site.
In 2016, FT declared tests of teh new, faster FT.com resulted in users were up to 30% more engaged with the site.
In 2017, Zitmaxx Wonen reduced load time to 3s and conversions jumped 50.2%. Revenue from mobile increased by 98.7%.
In 2017, COOK increased conversion rates by 7% after reducing average page load time by 0.85s. The bounce rate also fell by 7%.
In 2017, Pinterest performance optimisation resulted in a 40% decrease in wait time, a 15% increase in organic traffic and a 15% increase in signups conversion rate.
In 2017, BBC declared they lose an additional 10% of users for every additional second it takes for their site to load.
So do you want to share in those results?
If your website is due for an update, especially in the speed department, here are four easy fixes to start with to improve your website’s speed.
Optimise your images
One of the most important things you can do to decrease your download time is to optimise your images. There are several ways which you can do this, but the easiest is if you have photoshop. Simply open the fill in Adobe Photoshop and go to Save For Web and reduce the image to 70%. You probably won’t notice the difference in quality, but you’ll have nearly halved the image size.
Load background images via external CSS
Its possible to present images as part of the background, call up through external CSS style sheets. Browsers download background images after everything else. By using this technique your text will load instantaneously, and your site users can freely roam about the page while your 50kb fancy image downloads.
Minimise white space, line returns and comment tags
Every single letter or space in your HTML code takes up one byte. It doesn’t sound like much, but it all adds up. We’ve found that by working through your page source and eliminating unnecessary white space and comments, you can shave off up to, or even over 10% of its file size.
Minimise unnecessary JavaScript and other client-side scripting
JavaScript and other client-side functional elements on the page may be slowing your page down. Remove them if they aren’t entirely necessary.
Tip of the iceberg
These four tips are just a few of the many ways you can improve the speed of your website. We chose them because they’re some of the easiest changes to institute. But we recommend you speak with your web developer who can suggest additional steps to increase your website speed.
You can test your website speed here, to see if your potential customers could be turning away from your website.