Website speed is one of the most important elements and overlooking it may cause you a huge drop in website traffic. If your website takes more than 2 or 3 seconds it is highly likely that people will either close or switch to another website which can also be your competitor’s websites who has adopted for better technology with quick browsing option. Recently websites are becoming more graphically appealing and heavy with use of high quality images and videos. These elements certainly help in engaging customer however it also slows down website. Essential measure needs to be taken to balance such elements ensuring that Websites download speed is minimum and falls between the range of 2 to 3 seconds. Websites with higher loading time are likely to lose visitors. This is statistically proven and will result in high bounce rate and ultimately effect conversion and revenue.
It is obvious that website loading time has a direct impact on customer satisfaction and conversions rate. People just hate waiting. One major reason why people are turning to buying online is because they are fed up of waiting in queues at the bank line or at security control at airport or at grocery store for checkout. On the other hand, in the online world, we have facility to accommodate thousands of people at the same time and that is what people exactly expect these days. Technology has advanced so much and made people habitual to using fast applications. They have lost tolerance of using slow applications.
There is a good infographic represent from kissmetrics showing how loading time affects your bottom line
It Is Mobile World
Mobile usage has increased rapidly. We can say that more that 55% of online traffic these days is mobile traffic. Almost everyone is able to access internet through mobiles and with so many smart phone users out there people so often use mobile internet to buy, to get information or to check social profiles. It would be a huge mistake to avoid such volume of audience. We call them ‘fast users’. They need to be presented with high speed mobile optimized website if you want conversion out of them.
True Fact - More than 73% mobile users say that they have encountered a website that was too slow to load.
Bad Performance = Low Conversation Rate
Website speed has direct impact on customer satisfaction thus obtaining slow speed website ultimately result in low conversion rate. According to statistics, it is proven that delay in loading by 1 second result in 7% less conversions.
True Fact - Amazon encountered 1% of less revenue due to a 1 second delay in page response.
What we can do to avoid bad performance? Below are the few rules you should follow in order to have fast loading website:
Speed is crucial
Speed directly impacts on website conversion rate. If a website is properly optimized it can give a competitive advantage.
Give more importance to performance and treat it as a part of UX design. Check if your website is executing perfectly on numerous browsers with good speed. This is also crucial since you never know where your customers are coming from and which browsers they use.
Give importance to content – Mobile First Approach
Content is more important. Presenting and planning content layout must be well researched and implemented. You have limited space and lots of things in your mind to show. There are images, titles and body text to be accommodated with expectation of being effective enough to get maximum results.
When planning for website development, keep mobile approach in mind. Having excellent performing website with great content will eventually benefit you with increase in revenue.
Set website performance budget
Website performance budget is like, you set budget for page and do not allow it to exceed the limit. This is more oriented to setting website performance targeted rather than finance.
Your budget may contain number of requests, page weight and loading time. It is more important to decide your goals in the planning phase. For example if you set goal for home page should under 500kb and thinking to design content with 5 full screen slider images, it is certainly impossible to achieve it.
Once you achieved the goal, stick to it. For next time when you want to add some more functionality to the page, you need to ensure it doesn’t exceed the budget. If it does then:
- Optimize the existing feature
- Remove the less priority feature
- Don’t add new feature
Enhance performance
This is very important section you need to be religious about it. The main reason to optimize your website is to squeeze the last kb out of your website.
- Reduce the http requests
- Compress file size
- Minify CSS and JS
- Reduce latency
- Optimize critical rendering path