Site Performance matters when it comes to meeting your customer expectations.

Harry Shum, a former speed-specialist researcher at Microsoft rightly stated- “Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web.”

Google loves pages with quick Loading time and considers it an important factor for ranking on the search engine. It is also considered as an important aspect of good user experience.

The stakes are high and consumers show no mercy when moving on to another competitive site if your site takes a few seconds extra to load!

These statistics depict how the loading speed of a site is affecting e-commerce business-

79% of customers who are “dissatisfied” with a website’s performance are less likely to buy from that site again

64% of smartphone users expect a website to load in 4 seconds or less

47% of online customers expect web pages to load in 2 seconds or less

One second can bring about a huge difference in the e-commerce arena!

Survey has also revealed

1-second delay in load time can cause 11% loss in page views with a 7% drop in conversions

Begin by improving the page loading speed and site performance. Have you analyzed how fast your page is loading?

If your site takes more than 2 seconds to load, it is time that you take some corrective action.

Check the current performance of your page

Google Analytics can give you a thorough analysis of your website’s performance.

Click on the tab called ‘Behavior’.  Then select ‘site speed’ and then click on ‘Overview’. You can monitor and in addition, see some important stats here like domain lookup time, average user’s download and response time.

The ‘Page Timings’ section gives an overall loading rate for each page on your website. A red box on any of the pages indicates high loading time.

There are several other helpful tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights, Pingdom, GTmetrix, KeyCDN, Webpage Test etc. that can accurately assess the speed and provide insights on your website’s performance.

A few key steps that will help you to enhance the performance and speed of your website-

You can compress or optimize the images

Websites with heavy images often take time to load. It often becomes too much for a browser to handle. Edit and adjust your images to a presentable quality and upload it to the server.

Photoshop or Firework helps to reduce the size of image drastically. Use ‘save for web’ option to optimize size perfectly.

The image quality slider in the apps gives you a glimpse of the visual trade-off between the crispiness of the image and graphics file size.

You can avoid using text on the image unless necessary. This helps to remove unnecessary layers from an image and reduces the size. Besides, most graphics editing programs give options to export at reduced quality.

Plugins also help to compress images but might produce inconsistent results at times.

Icon fonts are useful   

Similar to fonts for text, there are fonts for icons as well. These are vector graphics and are scalable without losing the quality or crispness.

These are quicker, easier and help to cut down on the page load time.

GZIP compression

GZIP compression and deflation helps to reduce file size by almost 70% without tweaking the quality of content, image or video on the site.  You need to check with your web host if they have these two important elements on their server. These are extremely suitable for a text-based file. Most of the web browsers support this. Ensure that it is enabled on your site.

Erasing unused active plug-ins

Plugins are common on most websites. Do an audit at regular intervals to identify the ones that are no longer in use or necessary.

This is an important step to boost your site’s speed as plugins often load script and styles to the web page.

Reduce HTTP requests

A study by Yahoo revealed that 80% of a web page’s load time is utilized to download different sections of the page like style sheets, scripts, and images. Individual HTTP request is made for each of these components on a page.

If you have multiple on-page components, these will increase the load time of a page. Minimize and streamline these requests as much as possible. Figure out how many requests, your site is making currently from ‘Developer Tools’ on Google Chrome.

Cutting down on the requests will boost the speed of your website.

Delete unnecessary files

Look for files on your site or on the backend that are not necessary. Erase those to make your website more efficient. This will definitely boost the performance and loading speed of your website.

Selecting the fast and correct hosting option

High traffic and high transactions days demands a scalable website that can effortlessly handle it without crashing.

While choosing your hosting platform keep these factors in mind-

• The platform should be scalable, fast and hence, the memory or bandwidth limits matters.
• A sudden increase in visitors, should not cause a crash but be handled smoothly.

There are 3 different hosting options that you can select from

1. Shared hosting
2. Dedicated server
3. VPS hosting

Select a hosting platform that can handle higher traffic levels easily without any delay in the loading time.

CDN is also important

CDN or content delivery network plays a definitive role in cutting down the loading time of your site.

Users who visit your site send individual requests to the same server where it is hosted.  Therefore, when the traffic volume increases, each requests take higher time to process, which in turn increases the load time. This is definitely not ideal for your business.

Besides this, users who are physically located far away from your server, will experience higher load times as the information will have cover a longer distance even in times when traffic volume is low.

However, with CDN, your site is cached on a global network of servers. Therefore, when any user accesses your site, the request is send to the closest server. The content loading time is much faster and the information received by the user is identical. It cuts down on the loading lags and several other latency issues.

Visitors do not want to browse through a sluggish site. Rather than feeling abandoned by them, work on these easy, straightforward steps to enhance your website’s user experience. It is a proven fact that speed sells. There is an important co-relation between speed and sales as it influences the increase and decrease of your conversion rates. It cuts down the bounce rate.

Cutting down on your site’s load time can have a positive impact on your brand as it helps to build trust in your visitors and also gives them a reason to recommend your website to others.