Many things help you drive and convert traffic on your website. The design has to offer good navigation that provides a clear, quick and convincing journey for visitors from first landing on your website to a final transaction.
That journey might have many stop points along the way, which is why it is important that the processes are fast. Websites that typically take more than four seconds to load a page are abandoned. User behaviour studies have found that for every 1 second of page loading, your website can lose 7% of revenue.
Yet there are many ways that you can increase your site’s speed. Here are five secrets to help you with your website design.
1. Use optimised images
Uploading images is important on website design. A good image can increase conversions and improve branding. However, they are also very memory intensive and some websites can see drastic improvements in speed by having more web-optimised images.
This can be done very cheaply yourself by using programs like RIOT.
2. Reduce HTTP requests
Yahoo reports that 80% of load time is due to the time downloading the different elements of a page. This includes images, scripts and stylesheets. Every element creates a need for an HTTP request. The more requests, the longer it takes for a page to render.
Reducing the number of HTTP requests is, therefore, another key way to improving website speeds.
3. Minifying resources
Sometimes coding in your website’s program can be very bulky. Every letter, word and instruction in your website’s build is something for it to download. However, these are important files as they determine the appearance of your website. When you are minifying, you can reduce the size of the files and therefore reduce the time it takes to download a particular file.
In addition, you can often combine some resources of the same type (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) into fewer files that reduce HTTP requests.
4. Enable browser caching
It is more than likely that your website won’t convert on the first visit. Sometimes, visitors will come multiple times to your site before completing a transaction. This is where browser caching can help because it can reduce the time it takes for the site to render on future visits.
Browser caching is a great option for e-commerce sites as well. But it doesn’t serve companies well that have a regularly changing web design.
5. Use external hosting platforms
If you host videos on your website, you can be sure that they are slowing down your website. Videos use a lot of memory. Instead, you need to use third-party hosting solutions, like YouTube, to host your video content to speed up your website but still offer top quality delivery on the content.
Videos on YouTube can also serve as an additional way to market your content. So using YouTube is highly encouraged.
By implementing the tips above, you can be sure to speed up your website. This will improve your website's conversation rate and improve revenue from online sources.