Losing customers before they even engage?
We have all had it, you have found a new site that is promising exactly the service or product that you are wanting, however when you go to access the page, you are stuck for ages waiting for the page to load, so much so that in fact you just press back in your browser and move onto a site that loads in a more suitable timeframe.
In today’s world a fast loading website can increase your conversions on the website, however a slow loading website will have a massively negative effect on your sites performance and end goal conversions on the site. A latest study has shown that even a one second page delay can result in the following decreases in conversions and customer satisfaction:
- 11% Fewer Page Views
- 16% Decrease in Customer Satisfaction
- 7% Loss in Conversions
As well as the obvious improvements for human visitors, one of the Google ranking factors comes down to speed of page load. So a fast loading site will give you an extra boost when it comes to ranking above your competitors. With this in mind, Google Page Speed has been produced to help with analysing site performance and feeding back on what areas can be worked on to improve your sites performance as well as giving you a score out of 100 for both mobile and desktop.
This tool is something that at Koded, we use on every one of our sites as a benchmark for where our sites are performing. We commonly see scores around the 75/80 mark which is where we aim for our sites to be. Some key factors to consider when aiming for these higher scores are the following:
- Server Compression
- Javascript and CSS minification
- Image Compression
- Leverage Browser Caching
Google however arent the only company offering tools for checking this sort of thing. There are other tools on the market too:
What can be done?
Whilst some of these factors are only updatable through the server itself, we try to make it as straightforward as possible for our clients to make sure that all media files that they upload are compressed as much as possible, as often we see images straight from Photoshop which are still massive. We use image compression extensions and websites to ensure this is the case on all uploaded images, with our favourite being TinyJPG.
Not only will compressed images and minified files help with page speed but they will also help to reduce the bandwidth of your site and in the long run help keep the costs of running your site down too.
22% of all online retail sites don’t use compression. It is expected that by 2016, average size of your webpage should be down to 2MB/s.
This is an important thing to factor as we now expect to see a larger proportion of traffic coming from mobile users, and lets face it, no one wants to have all of our their monthly data allowance swallowed up by one website.
How does your site perform?
Need our help?
If all of this is sounding like your site could do with a bit of attention, here at Koded, we would be happy to help and see how we can help you get the most out of it and improve your customer satisfaction and conversion. Contact us today to get a free consultation.
