Are your conversion rates are consistently underperforming and you’ve no idea about what you’re doing wrong?
You’ve checked your site layout and visual appeal. It is as easy to browse and looks attractive enough.
You’ve checked the site content and that’s not a problem, either. Your product descriptions are short, crisp and informative, and the blog posts are funny, relevant and educational.
You’ve checked the payment channels and you see you’re offering as many ways to pay for products as your competitors.
You’ve checked your images and video content. Your images are, without a doubt, great to look at and the videos are super-engaging.
Then what could be wrong with your site? Why are not visitors to your website not converting to customers?
Perhaps the cause of all your troubles may be “slow page load times”. A slow site can hurt your online business a lot more than you think.
Surprised?
Then check these stats.
When your site takes one second extra to load, customer satisfaction falls by 11%, page views by 11% and conversions by 7%. You can check more such stats on the impacts of loading speed on website performance graphical resource presented below.
This means a slow site causes your sales to drop sharply.
How do page loading times affect conversions?
Slow page loading can wreck conversion rates.
Reports show that 53% of online viewers abandon web pages with a load time of more than 3 seconds.
To put this in perspective, your site risks losing more than half of your viewers even before they enter your website.
This, as you can guess, can kill your conversion rates.
To make matter worse, the majority of visitors who decide to check out your site in detail will not pay a visit again on the count of slow site speed. A report reveals 79% of viewers don’t plan to revisit a site whose performance is unsatisfactory.
The survey also reports fast page loading time is an important factor for site loyalty for 52% of visitors. Additionally, 44% of consumers will not shy away from sharing their bad site experience with others. Furthermore, slow speed is the number one reason for leaving a purchase midway for 51% of online shoppers.
So if you wish to improve your conversion rates, you should speed up your site. Before you get to do that, however, you need to be clear about what’s a good page loading time.
What’s an acceptable page load time?
Sites that take 3 seconds to load have a 32% greater bounce rate probability than websites that load in just 1 second.
If you think 32% greater bounce rate probability is high, you may be really surprised–in a bad way–to know that an average site takes 9 seconds to load.
So if your site is as good as the average site, you are staring at a bounce rate probability that’s significantly higher than 32%.
And if it is below-par, your bounce rate is likely to be excruciatingly high.
That’s why your aim should be to bring down the site page load time to 2 to 3 seconds.
How can you do that?
You would probably need the services of a talented web developer. With site speed being crucial to your business’s success, which you can see all too clearly in this infographic, this is one investment that’s worth every penny.
If you feel that investment a bit too much for you, then you can do the following simple tweaks.
1. You will have to check if your host is fast enough to load your website under 3 seconds. You can research for it or ask about it web hosting forums. If you are a partner with a underperforming web hosting, the first thing you need to do is migrate to a better host with good TTFB(time to first byte), fast load time with and without stress and has decent resource allocation. Hosting Tribunal, a website dedicated to doing these tests every month lists Bluehost as best host when it is about loading speed. Choose it and solve almost half of your slow loading problems.
2. If you are dealing with WordPress like most others, you could take the help of plugins to optimize your loading speed.
Auto-optimize: To minify all your code in CSS, HTML, and other scripts. It even compresses them.
Cache Plugins: There are a few good plugins like W3 Total Cache, Cache Enabler, WP Super Cache which can save static HTML files of your pages on the server and serve them to browsers instead of processing resource heavy PHP every time browsers requests them.
Compressed and Responsive Images: You can reduce the size of your images by using plugins like WP smush and use responsive image sizes based on the viewing screen
3. If you are still not satisfied with loading speed after the above tweaks, you can implement technical tips from Moz to further enhance your loading speed.
Infographic URL: https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/how-speed-affects-website/
