Fact – Customers expect a page-load time of less than 2 seconds
Fact – 40% of users will abandon a website if the page-load is more than 3 seconds
What this means is that you have seconds or microseconds to retain and possibly convert new customers. If you can’t, they are gone and gone for good.
Here are some tips for optimising the speed of your website. By extension, you’ll be optimizing your customer retention.
Site Audit
You need to access the performance of your website. You can use open-source tools such as Lighthouse or Google PageSpeed to do this. Google is also kind enough to give your site a ranking out of 100.
Get Your Images Right
To increase page-loading time on your website, optimize all your images. FileOptimizer will do just fine for any Windows OS. Image optimization is essentially reducing the file size of your image without sacrificing quality.
Get SEO Right
Not only does Google’s algorithm take page-loading speed into account but it can improve your ranking for search engine results page (SERP) by 2 places. Be mindful of the fact that keyword-optimized content, image SEO and relevant backlinks will have a much more positive impact on your SERP ranking.
Mobile Optimization
Nowadays people spend 70% of their media time on smartphones. The problem is that so many commercial websites are poor performers on mobile devices. But don’t despair, there are solutions. WordPress and Shopify offer responsive themes so that web pages adapt to almost all screen sizes and devices. You can also use Google’s Test My Site to test your mobile page-loading speed on a 4G connection.
Conversion Optimization
Not only will speeding up your site improve your search rankings, but it will also have a dramatic effect on user conversion rates. There is a direct correlation between webpage load speeds and revenue. Research shows that a site that generates £100,000 in turnover per day will see an increase in sales of £7,000 when page speed increases by just 1 second. It makes you realize that every second and every millisecond counts towards your profitability and reputation.
