A few years back, Google, the most used search engine in the world, announced that the speed of the website is going to influence the web search ranking. Is it justifiable? Absolutely! When it comes to website speed, we need to know that a potential customer will not wait long before he switches to a competitors website. Due to the fast-speed internet and the increasing low levels of tolerance among this generation, it is most likely that they will not wait long enough for the website to load. A good website’s first impression is the amount of time in which it can load. The faster the speed of webpage loading, the more traffic your website will experience.
When it comes to a website, speed optimization should be the topmost priority of the development plans. Increased page load time leads to a big drop in the conversion rate of a website. Even a delay by a second can drop conversion by at least 20-30%.
However, it is not a tough task to work on speed optimization and get the desired results. Here are some tips which one can follow to get the most conversion through reduced page load time:
- Reduce render-blocking resources
A big reason why your website is loading slowly is that the code blocks the rendering process for the browser. Javascript blocks the Document Object Model structure of HTML before the browser can render it. Once the code execution is done, it returns to complete the Document Object Model structure. Document Object Model is an interface that enables the scripts to update the content, structure, and several other aspects of the document.
- Image Optimisation
It is important that every time you upload an image, you compress it using photoshop or a plethora of other software. For those who prefer quality, PNG is a good format otherwise for compression, it is in the JPEG format. Compressing images helps to reduce the size of the image, making your website load faster. There are several online websites to do the same, such as Short Pixel, and CompressJPEG. One needs to strike the right balance between quality and compression.
- Improve Server Response Time
Research has found that the response time for servers should be under 200 milliseconds. As the traffic on a website increases, the server response time also gets affected. It makes it difficult for the server to load resources to all visitors. Problems such as slow routing, slow queries of the database should be fixed.
- Remove unnecessary codes
Minifying codes such as JavaScript and HTML can help in reducing the page size. Google recommends using UglifyJS and CSSNano minification.
- Hold Browser Caching
Browser caching is a process in which the browser downloads all resources when a user visits a website. With the help of this, the browser doesn’t have to download resources every time with every page. This helps in increasing the speed as most resources load beforehand.
- Accelerate Mobile Pages
Mobile pages load much faster in comparison to other pages. This is because the site with Accelerated Mobile Pages doesn’t contain much JavaScript and other styling codes. With the help of AMP, the pages can load within 2-3 seconds. With the help of these tips mentioned above, the website page load time can reduce considerably. Taking one step at a time can be of great help especially to those websites that are struggling to get traffic. These steps are sure to help in increasing the conversion rate so they are worth a try!