Many studies and opinions from experts indicate that the speed of website page loading has a significant impact on a company’s profits and customer attraction. Good speed gives excellent results for your website, and if a customer tries to access your website and it loads slowly, they may give up and go to another site. This leads to a loss of traffic to your online store and your money, and consequently, it may affect conversion rates, increase bounce rates, and lead to bad user experiences.
Additionally, e-commerce companies must adhere to basic priorities to improve website speed and ensure that no obstacles are preventing it, such as uncompressed images or unnecessary plugins. Improving data storage methods and software enhancements to improve loading speed should also be considered. Website speed should also be improved on mobile devices since many people use mobile phones to access websites.
In general, website speed is a critical factor for the success of any online business, and companies must adhere to basic priorities to improve website speed and provide a smooth and fast user experience to increase the number of customers and profits.
What is the meaning of website speed?
The meaning of website speed refers to how quickly and smoothly a website can load its pages without interruptions. Since many users wait only a few seconds before leaving a website if it is not loading quickly, website speed is a critical factor in user experience and attracting visitors and customers.
Website speed affects many aspects of the user experience, including ease of navigation, page loading, and performing purchase transactions. When the website is slow, it affects the user experience and can lead to the user leaving the site and searching for an alternative. Therefore, website speed can be interpreted as an indicator of the efficiency and attractiveness of the site and its impact on the success of the business process.
How can you determine the speed and loading time of your website?
Many tools can be used to measure the speed and loading time of your website. Among these tools, Google offers a free tool called PageSpeed Insights, which helps evaluate the speed of your website and provides recommendations to improve its speed. The tool analyses the content of your website and provides detailed results on the speed of the website’s loading and overall performance.
There are many other tools available online that can be used to measure the speed of your website, and some of them can give you more detailed results about the performance of the site and what can be done to improve it.
Why is site speed important?
Conversion rate
Several studies have shown that website performance and speed of response significantly affect the conversion rate, which is the rate at which users complete the required action. Therefore, it is not just about keeping more users on fast-loading websites; they also convert at higher rates compared to slower websites. Many companies have discovered that reducing loading time by parts of a second can lead to an increase in conversions, which affects your business.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate is defined as the percentage of users who leave a website after viewing only one page. Users are likely to leave a website if it is not loaded within a few seconds. Therefore, a slow-loading website can negatively affect the user experience and increase the bounce rate, leading to a loss of potential customers.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Website performance is a crucial factor for Google’s search engine rankings. Website performance on mobile devices is especially important to improve search engine optimization and appear in the top search engine results.
User experience
Long loading times and slow responses negatively impact the user experience and leave a bad impression on the user. Waiting for a page to load can be frustrating for users, and it may lead them to close the website and have a bad experience. Therefore, it is crucial to optimize website speed and responsiveness to provide a positive user experience and retain users on the website.
How do you increase the speed at which your website loads?
1. Compress text and images
One of the reasons that can cause a website to slow down is unnecessary images and videos. Therefore, it is advisable to reduce the size and dimensions of images significantly and to delete irrelevant videos from your website. This will greatly increase the speed of your website.
2. Mobile compatibility and development of the website
One of the most important things to focus on is ensuring that your e-commerce website is compatible with mobile phones. Today, most consumers use mobile phones and rely on them completely for search, communication, and business, rather than laptops. Thus, the website should be designed to be responsive to every device and screen size.
3. Check your hosting provider
Always search for and make sure you have a good web hosting provider to provide strong support for your website and customers. Compressing images and improving compatibility with mobile devices mean nothing without a good hosting provider.
4. Caching
Caching is the process of storing your information on the user’s device so that it can be loaded faster when needed. This is highly effective and helps boost page loading speeds for users.
5. Reduce CSS and JavaScript
Delaying code from the top of the website to the bottom will result in a lower loading time for customers, as the top code is loaded first and the user will see the top part of the website while the code is loaded near the footer. It should be noted that it is better to have this done by specialists because this technique requires experts to handle it and can have many consequences if done incorrectly.
For example, it could lead to a loss of website functionality or incorrect loading. You can also use an additional component to reduce JavaScript code, which will increase page speed by eliminating code size.
6. Remove unused plugins
If you are using a content management system like WordPress, your website may be slow due to a large number of background installation processes, leading to reduced website loading and speed. Therefore, you should deactivate any unnecessary additional components, as this may solve the problem with the website and increase its speed.
7. Host your content on external sites
You can consider hosting large-sized videos on sites like YouTube and then embedding them on your website instead of uploading them through your website builder. Large-sized files can consume a considerable amount of space on your website, which can lead to reduced website speed. When you upload them on external platforms, it can reduce loading delays, create a new source for increasing traffic to your website, connect with the target audience in multiple ways, and improve your ranking on search engines.
9 statistics on page loading time
Here are nine diverse statistics to provide you with a better understanding of how the speed and loading time of your website can impact your business:
- The first five seconds of website loading time have the biggest impact on conversion rates.
- Website conversion rates decrease by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of website loading time between seconds 0–5.
- The average mobile website page loading time is 15.3 seconds.
- Almost 70% of users say that website loading speed affects their willingness to make online purchases.
- Some users surveyed about website speed were willing to give up videos and animations in exchange for faster loading times.
- The highest online commerce conversion rates occur on websites with loading times between 0 and 2 seconds.
- Website conversion rates decrease by 2.11% with each additional second of loading time between seconds 0-9.
- Compression of images and text can save more than 250 kilobytes, which is more than 25% of the page size, and contribute to faster page loading times.
- Although website traffic now occurs on 4G rather than 3G, the majority of mobile websites are still slow due to the high number of non-essential elements present.
Also read: How to Market via Email: Converting Prospective Customers into Real Ones
