How fast do the web pages of your site load on average? 10 seconds? 5 seconds? Or less than 2 seconds?

When a potential customer visits a website, they don’t only view their desired information – products or services – but also make a note of certain things. High-speed websites can allow you to enhance customer engagement, rank high on SERPs, and provide a better user experience.

Why Is Website Speed Relevant?

High-quality content helps attract prospective customers, but a website with a sluggish experience can make them go to your competitor’s site.

A survey was held that analysed ten websites belonging to different sectors and 26,000 landing pages. The following metrics were defined:

• A website that loaded in 9 or more seconds was taken as extremely slow.
• A website that loaded in less than one second was taken as extremely fast.

The findings revealed that reducing the time required to load a website boosted the conversion rate. A web page with a website speed of less than one second (extremely fast) had a 250% higher conversion rate than a page that took more than five seconds (slow) to load.

Interestingly, these gains didn’t exist between small vs extremely fast pages but also extended to extremely fast vs fast pages. It was found that extremely fast pages (loaded under one second) were 100% times quicker than fast pages (loaded in two seconds).

What this means for the future is that users have become more attracted to extremely fast sites. Such a stark contrast didn’t exist five years ago. It can also be predicted that the rise of 5G technology can make website speed more important in the next five years.

How to Improve Website Speed

Follow these tips to boost your site speed.

Apply Compression

Compression is a set of techniques that allow you to reduce the size of files. You can use file compression to minimise the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that are made of 150 bytes or more.

Control Redirects

It’s a well-known fact that redirects only add to the loading side of a website. Therefore, you should test your website extensively and reduce the number of redirects for speed gains.

Reduce Code in HTML, CSS, and JS

Go through your code and delete spaces, commas, and unnecessary characters. If there’s an unused piece of code, consider taking it out of your site. Similarly, remove code comments and formatting to augment your website speed.

Change the Host

There are different types of hosting, such as a dedicated server, VPS, cloud hosting, and shared hosting. Each of them has its own merits and demerits. However, when it comes to raw site speed, it’s better to stray away from shared hosting and choose something like a dedicated server.

Work on Browser Caching

You can cache a large amount of information in the browser. In this way, when a user revisits a page, it loads faster without reloading the complete content.