Improving Page Speed For Conversion? Let Us Count The Ways

Digital Marketing Indonesia, Digital Marketing Agency Indonesia

Improving Page Speed For Conversion? Let Us Count The Ways

Updated on: 27 September 2021

Digital Marketing Indonesia, Digital Marketing Agency Indonesia

Users’ attention span continues to decrease by 88% as time passes by. Because of smart devices, people want everything to be instantaneous, especially when it comes to their online dealings.

In a study, 70% of consumers say that page speed can influence their purchasing decisions. As consumer demands have changed, so do Google algorithms. Page speed was a search engine ranking factor for desktop in 2010, and then for mobile in 2018.

By the time Google’s Search Page Experience algorithm update rolls out in the near future, page speed will be more emphasized. One of the most important factors that can affect user experience is website speed. This means that you need to ensure that there are no delayed load times to avoid decreasing conversions. Google recommends a two-second load time, which can be done by minimizing HTTPS requests and checking JavaScript loading and server response times.

What is page speed a concern?

Every time your website takes longer to load, visitors are less interested in engaging with your site. This could also mean that they’ll be less likely to visit your site again. As a result, your site will have an increased bounce rate of 90%.

Poor page speeds translate to a high bounce rate and consequently, low conversion rates. There are weighted metrics that need to be factored in that could be causing low page speeds. These include the speed at which content is populated and the time it takes for a page to become online. Thankfully, there is room for improvement.

To check whether your page speed needs to be improved, check it using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. Your page speed score can fall within one of the three color-coded categories:

  • RED (0 – 49)
  • ORANGE (50 – 89)
  • GREEN (90 – 100)

Having a score below 90 can indicate that your page speed is too low to actually convert leads. However, if your site is still getting a high volume of traffic despite your low score, this could mean that you need to dig deeper into individual metrics to determine what could be slowing down your site speed.

Since Google puts a lot of weight on page speed when it comes to ranking websites, longer load times can mean your audience won’t find you easily on the internet. This is especially true now that Google has rolled out the mobile-first index, which means that websites need to be mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive.

Since 2015, mobile searches have outnumbered desktop searches and continues to grow. This is why Google puts more value on sites that load faster to ensure a good user experience for everyone.

How to optimize page speed?

To boost user experience on your site, you need to optimize your page speed. And because Google puts a lot of emphasis on mobile-friendly sites, you need to boost your site’s load times to make it more mobile-responsive.

Here are proven tips to improve your page speed and boost conversion.

1. Lessen HTTP requests.

According to Yahoo, 80% of a web page’s load time is spent downloading images, stylesheets, scripts, and other parts of a page. Every time a part of a website is downloaded, an HTTP request is made, which means that the more components your page has, the longer it will take for it to load. This means that the first step to optimizing page speed is to minimize HTTP requests.

Use Google Chrome’s Developer Tools to check how many HTTP requests your site makes. Look through your files and get rid of any unnecessary HTTP requests.

2. Minify and combine files.

There are many factors that can affect the speed of your website. File types and sizes, plugins, hosting or server, PC cache, and traffic volume are just some of the factors that can slow down your site’s load time. This is why you should compress files and images to minimize HTTP requests.

Aside from files and images, you should also minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML code to further boost speed performance. Unnecessary codes, whitespaces, characters, and duplications can be carried over to into the new website if you revamp it. These extra bytes of data can have a huge impact on your page speed, which is why you should minify codes. By doing so, you’ll also remove unnecessary or redundant elements that can slow down your load time even more. Similarly, a cleaner code can also help reduce your page’s file size, allowing it to load faster and at the same time allow you to combine and consolidate your files easier.

3. Opt for asynchronous loading of JavaScript and CSS files.

JavaScript and CSS files can be loaded in two ways: synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous loading means all files load all at once and in the order that they appear on a page. Asynchronous loading means some of the files will load simultaneously. What makes the latter more ideal is that it helps a page load faster since it opens files from top to bottom. Synchronous loading, on the other hand, will force a page to stop loading at one point and wait for the other files to fully load.

4. Minimize 301 redirects.

If you have revamped your website, you will need to use 301 redirect, an HTTP response status code, to send visitors to a live URL of the page they are looking for. This means that 301 redirect points visitors to a similar or page that is most relevant to the one they are searching for. This not only improves user experience but will also carry over any inbound or outbound links from the old page.

The problem with having too many redirects on a site is that it can affect website speed. If you have recently revamped your site, there’s a huge possibility that there is more than one redirect for one webpage, especially when new content becomes more available for SEO purposes. This makes it more difficult for search engines to crawl web pages, leaving visitors waiting for pages to load.

To minimize 301 redirects, you can use tools like Screaming Frog, which can help you identify redirect chains on your site and update 301 redirects. Aside from that, this tool can also help you pinpoint redirects that don’t help fortify your SEO efforts.

5. Shorten time to first byte.

Time to first byte or TTFB is the amount of time a browser takes for a page’s first byte of data to load. To optimize your page speed, Google suggests a TTFB of 200 milliseconds or less.

This is not a front-end performance factor that site owners focus on because TTFB is a server-side concern. Every time a visitor accesses your site, their web browser sends an HTTP request to your hosting server. During that time, there are three things that take place: response, server processing, and DNS lookup. You can check Google Chrome’s Developer Tools to find out how long these processes take on your site. You have to keep in mind though that your server response time depends on your own internet connection. So, the slower your internet connection, the slower your hosting server will respond.

6. Allow browser caching.

Caching allows browsers to act like a memory bank that remembers previous responses that will be fetched when the same visitors return to your site. This minimizes the need to make new HTTP requests every time a visitor returns to your, making your webpage load faster.

Increased page speed means enhanced user experience

A website owner needs to invest time, money, and effort into enhancing your website to boost user experience. However, your efforts will be for nothing if you do not ensure the speed at which your website loads. This is why you need to put the same amount of attention – or even more – when it comes to your page speed.