How important could page speed be? ⏳ The answer is, extremely important! Slow page speed on your most popular pages will badly affect your conversions as well as your SEO rankings.
Did you know that if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to fully load, more than half your visitors will leave immediately? 😳This means that page speed is crucial to your conversion rates! 🏆 If you cannot get your visitors to stay long enough to at least see your website, you will be dealing with low conversions for a while.
What’s more, page speed is a factor that determines your SEO rankings. If you are struggling with slow page speed on your most popular pages, you will definitely be ranked lower on search engine results. Google has been taking page speed into account for its rankings since 2010.
But what if you are dealing with a long page load time? What can you do to fix it?
You might be worried that your ga4 page load time seems disappointing. There is no need to panic.
First, do a test run for an accurate page load time analysis. If your page speed is longer than 2,5 seconds, check out the following options to better optimize your website speed 🏍️💨
1. Optimize your images
High-quality and appropriately sized images are crucial for the aesthetic appeal of your website 🌄 However, if your images are too large, they may be stalling your page load times. This means you may need to compress the images on your pages and optimize the formats to increase your page speed.
You can also use “lazy loading” to improve your page speed. Lazy loading means that only the currently viewed sections of the web page are loaded at a time. The more of the page your visitors browse, the more of it will be loaded.
2. Cache your pages
Caching is another great way to improve your page speed. If you are sure all your images are compressed and well-optimized, you may want to try caching your web pages to increase your page speed.
If you cache your web pages, your pages will be stored in temporary storage for shorter load times in the future. This way the second time that your visitors visit your website, they will be able to see your website much faster. There are two main types of caching: Server caching and browser caching.
Server Caching
To implement server caching, you will need to make sure you have a system in place that creates cached pages for your website’s visitors. Server caching is closer to your side as the eCommerce store owner. Your visitors will have no authority over server caches.
This means that you will need to provide an instrument that stores your pages on the server. Server cache will store queries, content or code on your server.
Browser Caching
Browser caching mostly functions on the user end. This means that your visitors browser will have control over the cache. The cached web pages are stored in the user’s browser instead of the server.
Only certain file types can be stored in the browser cache. These could be HTML pages, images, Javascript and CSS stylesheets.
3. Use a CDN
CDNs or Content Delivery Networks are a perfect way to store your pages across the network to appeal to your users around the world. This means that your web pages will be stored in different servers across geographies.
This way, your visitors from Spain will be able to load your pages from one nearby server while your visitors from Australia will load it from another.
Through the strategically placed Internet exchange points connected to CDNs, the cost of data transmission from one point to another is greatly reduced. This also helps store your content across the network and decreases your page load time.
4. Work on a better server response tim
If you have already finished your cache and CDN setup and are still stuck with low page speed, you may want to improve your server response time.
There could be many reasons why the server response time of your website is long. Your database queries may be slow, your library may be overcrowded, you may be suffering from insufficient memory or slow routing.
heybooster will help you identify the root problem that affects your server response time and offer you insights to help you remedy the problem points. All you need to do is sign up and start discovering your own website inside out.
5. Optimize Third Party JavaScripts
Do you have too many embedded youtube videos? Does your website come with a chatbot? 🤖 These external scripts may be increasing the usability of your website. However, they are also affecting your page load times ⏰
You may want to pick your battles with the third party JavaScripts ⚔️ Choose the most important pages to place the third party scripts and give up the rest.
You may not need a chatbot on every single page. Maybe you can skip the embedded video on some of your pages too!
6. Decrease the number of redirect
Too many redirects will mess up your page speed 🔁🕰️ Redirects can be useful to optimize the navigation of your website. However, too many redirects will slow down your load time. This means you need to be extra careful when placing redirects.
Of course, it is impossible to get rid of redirects altogether. You need redirects to make sure your visitors end up on the right page at the right time. But you must also make sure that your page speed is not being affected by the number of redirects on your website.
When there are too many redirects, there are also too many HTTP requests. This is why redirects affect your page load time. Go over your virtual pathways carefully and eliminate any unnecessary redirects to optimize your page speed.
7. Optimize Your Files
As we mentioned, the key move to reduce page load time is to make sure your website is not making too many HTTP requests. Another way you can reduce HTTP requests is to merge your files.
Your website design is made up of HTML, JavaScript and CSS files. It is possible to combine these files to reduce HTTP requests that your website makes to load your website every time a visitor visits your pages.
When you combine files, you should also get rid of any unnecessary spacing, indentations and codes that slow down your website. It’s almost like spring cleaning 💐💻Once you are done you will feel accomplished, we promise 🤓
Conclusion
If you are wondering the page speed impact on conversions, heybooster is ready to tell you about it all! 💬🚀 What’s more, heybooster will let you know of any anomalies in your traffic to make sure you are on top of all the problem points.
Run over to heybooster to speed up your pages and start your progress! 🏃💨
