As a website owner, you put in a lot of effort to develop an attractive site for your online business and include advanced functionality for users. But have you considered your website’s performance parameters? Viewers do not like to waste time; they expect fast results. When a website takes too long to load, they are likely to run out of patience. This will bring down the conversion rate of your business, which in turn negatively affects your revenue. Having products and services of the highest quality is not of much use if your viewers don’t hang around long enough to browse through them.
A graph of the average page load time versus the conversion rate will clearly show that a delay of even a few seconds can cause the conversion rate to plummet drastically. Just imagine the number of potential customers you have probably lost to a competitor because you did not put in a little extra time and effort to optimize your website’s performance.
Benefits of Increased Page Speed
Any performance improvements you can make to ensure that your pages load faster will boost your conversion rate tremendously. A website that loads fast creates a positive first impression with customers. This enables you to engage your viewers; their attention is retained on your website and results in increased sales for your business.
Another benefit that many web owners, designers and developers do not realize is that high page speed also enhances search engine optimization. Google’s algorithms for ranking websites on search engine results pages take into account your level of customer service, of which page speed is an important component. Make an effort to create quick loading web pages that do not hang indefinitely; you will be rewarded with increased exposure in search engine rankings.
Ways to Optimize Web Performance
To increase web page speed, you need to analyze and optimize your web performance. Analysis can be carried out by various easy-to-use Google PageSpeed tools and other third-party tools. Web optimization can be achieved in the following ways:
- Minimize image sizes and clearly indicate these in the code. Use efficient CSS selectors in your code and keep inline style blocks in the header. Reduce the number of plugins on a single web page.
- Compress the data traveling over the network in the form of HTTP requests and responses by minifying the Java scripts, and CSS and HTML codes.
- Cache all image files, CSS files and Java scripts and other static web page resources so that once downloaded from the remote server over the network, they are taken from the local disk. This will reduce your download time, your bandwidth and your web hosting costs.
Summary
If you strictly adhere to these optimization guidelines while developing your web pages, you will surely benefit from high page speeds. This will give your viewers an enhanced user experience and will put you closer to the top of search engine rankings. Both these improvements bring about a higher conversion rate so that your online business can prosper.
About the Author
Charles Dearing is a business website marketing consultant with broad experience. He often shares his observations on website marketing and SEO blogs. Visit SEO Works to learn about their SEO Packages.