Your company has invested employee man hours and money into ensuring that its website has both engaging content and vibrant, attention-grabbing graphics. , and you expect great results. All of the work you placed into your site will be for nothing if it doesn’t load quickly enough. We live in an age where user attention spans are shorter than that of the common medfly, so load time has to be blindingly fast.
A recent study shows that nearly half of all users expect a site to load no longer than two seconds. Another study which supports the two-second user expectation showed that over half of users would leave a site if it takes just three seconds to load. Most customers will not come back to your company’s website if they leave due to load speeds.
This can be deadly to a company, even more so if the company’s core business is e-commerce. A customer who goes to a site to purchase a product expects that it will be a quick, uncomplicated process if your company sells a product available through digital downloads, they expect the download to be quick and uncomplicated as well.
Inconsistency Means Higher Bounce Rate
If you correct the load time on the company site’s homepage, but still have product pages that are slow, it is just as frustrating to users. It is a near certainty that when a customer has been convinced, they need your product on the homepage, but it takes five seconds for your company’s product page to load, they will bounce.
Why is a higher bounce rate an issue aside from losing a sale? Google interprets user bounces as a sign that your content isn’t what it is supposed to be, or that it is low quality. Your subsequent SERP ranking with Google will be lower. Repeat this scenario again, and again it means your website will have fewer visitors and even fewer conversions. Lower SERP not only hurts your bottom line but your branding efforts.
Get Faster
Here are some suggestions on how to improve your site’s speed, which will increase your CRO.
How Slow Are You?
Test your site to see exactly how fast (or not so fast) it loads. There are a number of website performance testers such as Google Page Speed Insights and Pingdom which will give you a speed analysis report. If the results you receive say that your company’s site is slow, you can then take action.
Code
If your site’s code has too many spaces and unneeded characters, it will cause drag. Eliminate unnecessary spaces and characters, and the sites speed will improve without hurting function. Use compressor tools for HTML and CSS for the process of “minification.”
Optimize to Improve Speed
Images that are too large and long video files can slow down a website significantly. Once you have downsized the image and video files, your webpage can load much faster.
Don’t Overload Downloads
If a customer has an interest in a specific product or service, don’t include everything your company produces or does. This means too many image files and slower load times and the customer may not even scroll down the page to see the other images that loaded.
Use a web design strategy known as lazy loading instead. This strategy will save loading resources by delivering only the images and text that the customer requires. WordPress features lazy loading tools such as Infinite Scroll which will load content as the user scrolls down the page. There are also lazy loading plugins tools for eCommerce platforms such as WooCommerce.
With a little due diligence and forethought, you can increase your company site’s load speeds and start converting users into customers. MosierData would be happy to assist with all your website questions and needs.