Back in 2014, according to research by Akamai, users expect websites to load in 3 seconds or less. Today this still rings through but the difference is now customers expect 2 seconds or less on a mobile device.
Akamai also found that the top 500 ecommerce websites in the world have a median load time of approximately 10 seconds, well over the expectation of shoppers. This cause’s frustration, abandoned carts, and a lot of lost revenue.
By improving the speed of your website, you can dramatically improve your conversion rate. In fact, on average, just one second shaved off your load time can boost conversions by 7%!
To explain further, Intuit found the following:
- a 3% increase in conversions was gained for each second removed from load time when the total load time was between 7-15 seconds
- a 2% increase in conversions was gained for each second removed from load time when the total load time was between 5-7 seconds
- a 1% increase in conversions was gained for each second removed from load time when the total load time was between 2-5 seconds
“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”
– Steve Jobs
Here are some of the many ways to increase your page speed:
- Enable compression on your webhost, we can check for you.
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML using a plugin or on your web host.
- Reduce redirects, examine what you are loading and is it really necessary.
- Remove render-blocking JavaScript, Technical one, ask your web designer or us!
- Leverage browser caching, another techy one see above.
- Improve server response time, you may need to invest in better hosting
- Use a content distribution network, should come with your webhost, we can check for you.
- Optimize images. the biggest culprit in slow website’s, we can tell you which images needs to be fixed.