Business owners are often preoccupied with various aspects of their website: how it looks, how the content should sound, and how to get on top of search engine results. A trend among online businesses is to incorporate a bunch of features aimed at catching the attention of website visitors and enticing them to stay. What these businesses are getting wrong is that adding too many features to a website hampers its loading speed (even more so if their website is not optimized), and this is not good for the business.
Overlooking your website’s page speed is a fatal mistake as it greatly influences how your business performs online. Page speed affects user experience, which, in turn, affects how users respond to your website. You only have a couple of seconds to make an impression and engage your customer before they decide to click away, and in a world where instant gratification is the norm, a slow loading page could cost you thousands of dollars in sales.
Here’s exactly how page speed affects your business and why you shouldn’t ignore it:
1. Higher Bounce Rates
Your bounce rate reveals how your visitors perceive your website. Bounce rate is the number of site visitors who navigate “away” from your website. This is measured by the number of single-page sessions with zero-second duration divided by your page session’s total number.
Simply put it this way: the higher the bounce rate, the higher the number of site visitors who close your page quickly; the lower it is, the longer your site visitors stay on your page, and the higher the chance of them availing your service or buying your products.
Bounce rate is greatly affected by page speed. No matter how aesthetic the website is, and no matter how well-written the contents are, if your page does not load as fast as it should, your visitors will turn away from your website.
2. Lower Conversion Rates
A slow-loading site could cause problems when processing transactions, and this will bring into question the reliability of your business. Even a fully-decided buyer can change his or her mind if your page loads longer than it should, especially if he or she is about to check out his or her cart.
People navigating away from your site because of page speed delays do not add to your conversion rates. 25% of customers leave if the website does not load up within the first four to five seconds of visit, and nearly half of that percentage will not return to your website at all.
That being said, page speed contributes largely to your business’s bottom-line sales.
3. Drops Your Site Ranking
Does page speed affect SEO? Yes, it does. Page speed does not only matter to your site visitors. It also matters to Google.
Google considers bounce rates, user experience, and page loading speed when ranking websites. If your bounce rates are high and your page loading speed is slow, your website is likely to be ranked low on search results.
How to Speed up Page Load Time
1. Dedicated Hosting
Optimizing page speed highly depends on the infrastructure behind the servers. When you have a dedicated website host, your page speeds up a lot faster as compared to shared servers.
2. Use CDN and GZip
Content Delivery Network (or CDN) is a distributed group of servers that works well in keeping the distance between server and user shorter. This travel distance matters in loading up content pages.
Most CDNs are GZip-enabled. GZip, a software application, compresses HTML, CSS, and Javascript files (except images and videos) into smaller ones, thus enabling faster loading time.
3. Optimize Images
A common cause for slow loading pages is large images. Decreasing the size without compromising the quality of the images is possible by using optimization plugins. Also, remember to use the proper file format – JPEGs for photographs and PNG for 16-colored graphics.
4. Clean up Files, Media Library, and Database
By removing unnecessary characters, spaces, commas, comments, and unused codes, you make it easier for the page to load faster. The same is true when you clean up your unused or old photos and images.
Optimize your website with the help of Advanced Digital Media Services.
It is quite clear how important page speed is for SEO. For your business to perform well online, you must not overlook your page loading speed. If you are looking to optimize your website but don’t quite know how to speed up page load time, contact us at Advanced Digital Media Services.
At Advanced Digital Media Services, we have experts in the page speed optimization process. We follow an effective process of optimizing HTML coding, graphic display, redirects, and server location to increase your overall page speed. To boost it further, we also offer dedicated hosting! Let us speed up your page and start speeding up your sales! Call us up at 877-237-6969.
