In this fast-paced world where businesses fail in a matter of seconds and it is hard to find time, speed has become an important aspect of almost every area of our lives including the internet and technology. Customer surveys show that 40% of the people switch to another website if the website takes more than 3 seconds to load. Another survey shows that 49% of the people don’t visit a slow-loading website again in the future. Isn’t it a huge blow to your business? This is a huge loss in terms of potential customers. In order to make people transact or convert, you first need to increase the number of visitors to your website. This is where website speed optimization comes into the picture.
WordPress speed optimizationis the process of customizing or minimizing the elements on your website in a manner that helps reduce its loading time. It is the process of speeding up the loading of your website in order to increase visitors and conversions.
Benefits of speeding up your website
From increasing conversions to improving your ranking on Google search engine, the benefits of website performance optimization are never-ending. Some of the major benefits have been listed below –
Improve User Experience:
The popular phrase ‘First impression is the last impression’ should be kept in mind while trying to improve user experience. No matter how good your service is or how well your website content is, it won’t make sense until your website loads in less than 3 seconds. Your website loading speed is the first encounter of your customer with your website and hence it should be impeccable. A survey shows that even a 1-second delay in loading time can reduce customer satisfaction levels by 16% and 79% of the people don’t buy from poor-performing websites.
Increase Conversion Rates:
Increase in website loading speed leads to an increase in the number of visitors and improves the user experience thereby leading to an increase in conversion rates. Customers are more likely to buy from a website that shows exceptional performance. 67% of the customers are unwilling to buy from slow-loading websites and a 2-second reduction in loading time will likely improve conversion rates by 15%.
Improve your website traffic:
It is very important to increase the traffic on your website. A delay of even 1 second can reduce page views by 11% and lead to a loss of 20% traffic.
Visitors Retention:
An increase in the loading time of your website can also cost you your existing customers. Remember, your goal is to increase website traffic and customer retention is as important as increasing visitors to achieve your goal. Survey shows that for 52% of people site speed plays a major role in their site loyalty.
Increase your reach on Social Media:
If your website loads in less than 3 seconds it will also impact your position on the news feed on various social media platforms. Faster websites or web pages appear higher and gain more traffic and conversion. Page speed optimization can help increase your reach across social media platforms.
Improve your Google Search engine rankings:
A faster website loading speed improves your position on the core web vitals. Core web vitals are the metrics that Google uses to measure the user experience of your website. A faster website can help you rank higher on the Google search engine.
Effective ways to speed up your website
Here are some simple and effective ways that can help you speed up your website.
Remove unnecessary plugins:
You should remove all the unnecessary plugins as they affect your website’s speed and reduces the user experience especially in CMSs based websites. You should try to avoid plugins that have a lot of styles and scripts.
Image optimization:
Images are the main reason why websites load slowly. Large-sized images can significantly increase the loading time of your website. You need to compress the images while retaining the image quality in order to fix the problem. You can also use lazy loading to ensure that the customers are presented with the information as and when required. This helps increase the speed of the website.
Cache optimization:
Unnecessary cached data can reduce the speed of your website. You should avoid unimportant server requests and ensure that your browser uses local memory to cache the resources. This can reduce your page loading time significantly.
Reduce redirects:
Reducing the number of redirects can reduce broken links and fix the issue. If there are too many broken links on your website, it can affect the overall speed of your website on your mobile devices.
Minimize java scripts:
You need to remove all the unnecessary characters from the source code to minimize it. Make sure that the minification process does not lead to a change in the functionality and speed up your website at the same time. Unnecessarily long Javascripts can increase your page loading time significantly. You should work on the same to fix this issue.
Use Content Delivery Network:
You can use a content delivery network to reduce the page load time. A content delivery network is a system of distributed networks that provide web pages to a user on the basis of their locations.
Improve response time of server:
A server time of 200 ms or less is considered to be good. You should always try to achieve that standard. You can work on server routing, slow database requests, and a lack of memory to reduce your website loading time.
Reduce unnecessary spaces:
Unnecessary white spaces can reduce the speed of your website. Things like white spaces, line returns, and comment tags should be focused on to improve your website response time as they increase the size of your webpage making it difficult to load.
How can you improve your website conversion rates?
Who doesn’t want to improve the conversion rates of their website? Conversion rates refer to the number of people who visit your website and end up purchasing your products or services. It leads to an increase in revenue and profitability. Given below are a few ways in which you can improve your website conversion rates.
Speed up Your Website:
Speeding up your website plays a very important role in improving the rates of conversion. Optimizing the images and other elements present on your website to reduce your loading time will help speed up your website. A faster loading website will improve customer experience and thereby improve the conversion rates. Getting conversions is not easy and requires a lot of effort. Speeding up your website is the primary and most effective way to stop your customer from shifting towards your competitor.
Work on Core web vitals:
Core web vitals are the metrics or standards used by Google to measure how the users experience your website. It consists of
LCP – a measure of the loading time of your website.
FID- A measure of the time that the website takes to respond to the first interaction by the user.
CLS – A measure of the stability of the elements present on the website.
Working on the above-mentioned parameters and constantly improving them can lead to higher rates of conversion as it will help you gain a higher ranking on the Google search engine.
Add testimonials and reviews on your website:
Adding testimonials add credibility to the services provided by you. It is important to make the user believe in your words. Adding testimonials and reviews will help the user understand the quality of products or services you provide and build trust in the mind of the user. One of the main reasons people don’t buy from a website is the lack of trust. Creating trust in the user’s mind should be your top priority to increase the rates of conversion.
Avoid Distractions:
Rather than distracting the customer with too much information, you should serve him clear, concise, and to the point information. Make sure that your page has easy navigation and is understandable. Try to remove unnecessary information and fluff to reduce the size of your webpage, make it load faster, and improve the rates of conversion. Use a lot of visual text to make your user understand the content but make sure to compress the images.
Focus on your Content and CTA:
The content present on your website plays a very important role in converting your customers. Make sure that the content you put out on your website is relevant, clear, and easy to understand. This will help increase the user conversion rates. You should also work on the placement of the CTA buttons to increase user engagement.
Speeding up your website can improve your website conversion rates significantly. Other than speed there are various other factors that affect website conversion rates. By following the simple tips mentioned in this article, you can improve both the speed and the conversion rates of your website.
If you are willing to get your website speed optimized, W3Speedup provides wordpress, magento, drupal and Shopify speed optimization services.
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