How to Speed up Your Site to Increase Conversions
Increasing site loading speed is one way to improve behavioral factors and increase conversions. Often site owners don’t understand why pages take so long to load and visitors leave. Today we will look at ways to solve problems with slow loading.
Image Compression on the Site
The desire to upload images in high resolution to the site is understandable. You want your visitors to see the best shots. At the same time, it is tough to know the difference between a medium and high-quality image when viewing pages on the Internet with the naked eye.
Your site’s overall “weight” largely depends on the placed visual content. By reducing images, you free up space and speed up page loading. You can resize a photo using special services. With just a couple of mouse clicks, your image weighs 60-90% less.
Often, services offer you several compression options – with or without loss of quality. You can choose the best option depending on the goals you are pursuing.
Page Compression
To make your pages on the site load faster, you can use the compression of the pages themselves. For the HTTP protocol, compression is best done using ZIP and GZIP technologies. You can check the compression results using the whatsmyip service.
Using WebP
Using the WebP format will make your pages on the site even more accessible. This technology allows you to get a size 26% smaller than in the PNG format. If the classic formats give a page load time of 5.7 seconds, then using WebP, you can achieve a time of 2.3 seconds.
Lazy load Images
The essence of the technology is lazy loading. In simple words, if a visitor to your site does not need images in the text, he may not download them. Photos will start loading and appear on the site only in response to user actions.
Caching
Caching is one of the main ways to optimize pages on websites. With it, slow SQL queries are replaced with static HTML code. The generated code is saved for a specific time. This can be an hour, a day, a week, or any other selected period. As soon as the time expires, the cache is cleared, and a new file is formed.
Minify CSS and Javascript
Do not unnecessarily use a lot of CSS and Javascript on the page. The fewer such codes in the page’s structure, the “easier” it will be. As a result, the site loads faster. You can always use special tools to remove unnecessary code elements. For example, jscompress will do.
If, before processing, the site loaded on average in 5.3 seconds, then after removing unnecessary elements, the download speed increased to 2.7 seconds.
Reduce the Number of Requests
When your site’s pages are loaded in the user’s browser, many requests are sent to the site’s server. The more of them, the slower the content on a particular page will load. By removing the number of requests, you can increase the speed of loading the site. You can opt out of the following items:
- some pictures on the site;
- unnecessary files;
- codes and functions.
The ideal site, in terms of loading speed, can be called Google. There are a minimum of elements on the main page. As a result, the page loads instantly even with a low Internet connection speed.
Decrease Server-Client Distance
The distance between the server of your site and the user who loads a particular page has a direct role in the loading speed. You can also solve this problem; it is enough to use CDN services. Their principle of operation is straightforward – they download some of the elements necessary for the operation of the site from their servers, which are located as close as possible to the user. Images are often loaded; as mentioned above, they make up a large part of the “weight of your site.”
The most popular CDN services:
- CloudFlare;
- Incapsula;
- DataPath;
- Netlify.
How to Analyze a Site
Several tools can help you analyze the state of your site. Serpstat’s Site Audit tool allows you to investigate issues that affect page loading speed. Also, using the tool, you can find various vulnerabilities on your site.
You can also use various elements to change the page speed. Here are some options for you:
- Google PageSpeed insights. The most popular tool among web admins. It allows you to analyze the loading speed of both the main version of your site and the mobile one. After checking the rate, the service will give some practical recommendations that will help you improve your site.
- Pingdom Tools. After analyzing the site, the tool will tell you how fast pages are loading. The time is shown in milliseconds. The service also gives your site optimization scores. The higher they are, the better.
Website loading speed is one of the main factors that affect conversion. According to Google, the optimal time to load a page is 2.2 seconds. You should always strive to improve this indicator so as not to lose your potential visitors.
