Marketing Digest

How to Effectively Reduce Page Load Times on Your Website

Marketing Digest Writing Team

 

Reduce Page Load Times on Your Website to Increase Page Views and Boost Conversions

Site visitors are an impatient lot. According to a study published by Aberdeen Group (@aberdeengroup) a mere one-second delay in page load time yields 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% loss in conversions. On average, a web page must load in less than three seconds or the business risks losing customers and revenue.

Despite the high expectations of site visitors, instead of shrinking web pages to ensure faster loading times, the average size of web pages is growing annually. With websites getting bigger and the ideal number for load times inching closer to two seconds, what can webmasters do to significantly reduce their page loading times?

Listed below are some of the best tips to help your website load faster:

Remove Unnecessary Elements from a Web Page   

According to an article that appeared on Small Business Trends, making a website lighter reduces page loading times. To help a heavy web page load faster, superfluous elements need to be removed. “Remember, the smaller a Web page is, the faster it will load. If there are images and videos that are absolutely not relevant to your content, delete them immediately.”

Finding these superfluous elements will no doubt be challenging; hence, webmasters should dig a little deeper to find out which components are providing value to the website and which aren’t.

Compress the Web Page

Full-sized web pages take a long time to load. Compressed web pages, on the other hand, load faster, as the server does not need to send a lot of data to the page while it’s loading. If you’re looking for page/data compression algorithms, there are multiple options—deflate and GZIP being some of the most popular.

Using the GZIP compression algorithm, popular web servers like Apache and IIS compress resources on a web page automatically on HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Content can be optimized for compression by ensuring consistency across HTML and CSS code.

Reduce the Size of Images

Webmasters can save precious bandwidth by altering the size of images using tools like Picturefill and Adaptive Images. New image formats—such as WebP and JPeg XR—can also be adopted, as they reduce image weight by 20%-50% without compromising image quality.

Listed below are some of the recommended formats for images:

Implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network takes a website’s static files—such as CSS, images, and JavaScript—and delivers them to servers that are near the user’s physical location (servers that are near a user’s physical location will load pages more quickly). Large websites use CDN to deliver faster page loading times to users around the world.

Split Larger Web Pages into Multiple Web Pages

Extremely long web pages will take a longer time to load. Instead of reducing content on extremely long web pages, why not split the web page into multiple pages that are shorter in length?

Go for Cache Versions of Static Resources

Want to implement a process that quickens page speed and reduces server lag time? Browser caching stores cached versions of static resources. When users visit a page on a website, the cached version will usually be served unless it has changed since it was last cached; this saves a lot of requests to the server and makes loading times faster.

For more useful and actionable tips on how to reduce page loading times to increase conversions, check out KISSmetrics’ helpful article, “Speed Is A Killer – Why Decreasing Page Load Time Can Drastically Increase Conversions”.

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