There are few things worse than searching for a term, finding the website you are looking for, then having to wait 5 seconds for the page to load, only to see the page auto-resize itself and make you wait a whole 3 seconds more!

OK, fine, maybe there are a few things out there more horrible than slowly loading pages, but you’d be hard press to find anything more annoying when it comes to user interaction with your page.

People these days are so used to having exactly what they want, whenever they want it, at the click of a button instantly that they won’t bother with you if you aren’t up to speed. Maybe that’s why bounce rate data shows that people jump ship usually after 3 seconds if your page hasn’t loaded yet.

Increasing your speed has shown to drive traffic to your site from search engines, increase conversions, and boost revenue. Let’s see how and why you should do it.

Increase conversions (by decreasing your bounce rate)

Bounce rate is just a fancy term for the amount of disgruntled users who click the back button from your page, and head back to the SERP. Simply, when people leave your web page.

Several studies have shown that almost 30% of users expect your website to load within 2 seconds, and will give up and go to another site after 3. That gives you very little room to manoeuvre. Bear in mind that this study is a few years old, the percentage is likely to be even higher now.

On top of that, 80% of users with a bad experience said they wouldn’t return to the website again. Talk about holding a grudge. Every second longer that your website is taking is decreasing satisfaction, and killing your conversion rate.

Tip 1: If you want to speed up your web page, decrease the size of your images. Bigger isn’t always better. Images of 800X600 were the former recommendation, but smaller sizes have shown to be even better with the rise of mobile.

Find out the maximum width of your content area and stick to that for a maximum width. It’s very easy to do, just right click on your content area and ‘inspect element’.

Boost revenue (by increasing conversions)

It makes sense, doesn’t it? Customers that don’t have to wait as long and can access the pages that they want to access are more likely to click the right buttons, hence leading to more revenue in the long run.

If a user bounces from your site, then no money for you. What is surprising is just how much it affects the bottom line of a business, though. In a study conducted by friendly global conglomerate Walmart, a 2-3 second difference in page loading times separated the people who bought from the people who didn’t. That isn’t much time.

Retail giant, Amazon further backed it up when they discovered that even 100 milliseconds of time lead to a 1% decrease in sales. Now factor in that both of these companies do multiple billions in revenue each year, and you see how much dough is being lost because of a second here or there.

Tip 2: If you are seeing continually slow page time, it is probably high-time you switch hosting providers. Often it comes down to how good they are. There is only so much that you can do. Higher prices are worth it when you see the benefits.

Drive traffic (by ranking higher on the SERP)

The SERP is another fancy term in marketing for the search results of a search engine, literally Search Engine Results Page. It is no secret that site speed is a major ranking factor for Google’s ever-elusive algorithm these days, but few are aware of just how much it affects them.

This is doubly so for mobile. While Google certainly puts more weight on things like relevancy for its results, speed has been part of the ranking factors for years now, and is an important determiner of which sites will provide the best user experience.

First, let’s define user experience. It is simply the usability of the web page, and how good or bad the user feels while interacting with your page. It is one of the most important factors on mobile, which is often a little more difficult for people to use than a traditional desktop.

Think it just stops with desktops and mobile phones? Think again. People spend a full 5 times more money via tablets than they do on smartphones, mainly for reasons such as keyboard and screen size. These two simple things affect the convenience of purchase, and as such you can see sales skyrocket by 5 fold.

Google introduced user friendly design into its algorithm for mobile, too. For example, terms such as “infinite scroll”, “mobile-friendly”, and “responsive design” are all the rage these days. Look at these figures for yourself:

• 72% of users in a study wanted a mobile-friendly site
• Mobile time now outranks desktop time
• Projections show that mobile revenue via apps will hit 70b by 2017

There is plenty more where that came from too, but these should show you that user experience, and mobile in general is here to stay. All of this means that you need to do what you can to make a mobile-friendly user experience by increasing the speed of your website.

Tip 3: Those who want to know if they are mobile-friendly or not can check using Google’s free tool. It will tell you what you need to know.

 OK great, so how do we increase our website speed?

There are many things you can do besides the tips that we have already given. But first, it is a good idea to monitor your speed, and there are plenty of tools out there to do it.

A good tool will show you what is dragging you down, and what you can do to fix it. Just go to Google and type in page speed optimization tools, or something to that tune, and you’ll be golden. Some of our favourites are:

• http://tools.pingdom.com/
• http://www.webpagetest.org/
• https://gtmetrix.com/

From there, some other good ideas would be to:

• Use browser caching

When someone visits your site, you can automatically have your website’s info cached onto a visitors computer. That way, the next time they return, they don’t have to load everything all over again. This could be a big help in making sure that you page loads quickly. GTMetrix explains it well here.

• Use a content distribution network

Content distribution networks (CDNs), also called content delivery networks, are networks of servers that are used to distribute the load of delivering content.

Essentially, copies of your site are stored at multiple, geographically diverse data centres so that users have faster and more reliable access to your site. This can drastically reduce the amount of time that someone waits to load your page.

• Continuously monitor your site for broken links

Nobody likes doing more work than they have to. The same goes for your computer. Broken links are just going to eat up time, and force everyone to do work that they don’t have to do.

BrokenLinkCheck will search and find all broken links on your site. It’s free to use and does a good job at finding dead links.

• Reduce Redirects

A redirect is when the browser is directed from one place to another, either to track clicks or connect different parts of your website together. While this is certainly a good thing, too many of them could leave your website running a little sluggish.

Try to only keep the ones that are necessary. If two places redirect to the same point, make sure they both go directly there, do not have one go to the intermediary first. This creates extra latency.

If there is anything that we can take away from this, it’s that people don’t like waiting. Even just a few seconds and they will be out the door. That’s why it is on you to make sure that your page is up to speed.

User experience and load times can drastically affect your revenue, conversion rates, and web traffic. In the end, it all comes down to your bottom line.

Make sure you are doing all that you can to improve your website’s speed, and take advantage of these tips. You don’t want your customers leaving and going somewhere else just because they needed to wait 100 milliseconds more.

If you would like your site optimised by an expert to make sure it is running at optimum capacity get in touch with us today.