How or tips to speed up website loading to increase conversions and engagement and how to solve this, if you are a website owner whether for business, e-commerce, sales, and other services think that loading speed on the site is not important, this is a big mistake!
According to a survey from crazyegg.com, just 1 second if the website experiences a delay when loading a page will result in:
- Fewer page views
- Decreased customer satisfaction
- Lost conversion
- Websites take a few extra seconds to load a page which will have a bad impact on generating new visitors and conversions to sales.
Site does not only contain eye-catching content or appearance for visitor satisfaction, this also has an impact on generating good rankings in the eyes of Google and also generating maximum profile profits. Let's discuss them one by one.
How website loading speed affects conversion
In fact almost all visitors expect the site they visit to load in less than 2 seconds and will leave the site if it loads in more than 3 seconds, if the site takes more than 3 seconds to load a page, it almost certainly loses half of the visitors before they arrive in the first place. loading site.
It is enough to give a hard blow why this can happen and also for visitors who stay on the website for a very slow time in loading a page, it can indirectly result in visitors not coming back again in the future and saying that the site they visit has a good performance. bad.
And the results of a survey conducted by crazyegg.com, in an article that says, 52% of customers say that loading speed on a site is very important to maintain their loyalty and 44% say that customers will tell their friends about their experiences with sites that have poor performance.
In this survey, if a site experiences a loading delay of just one second, it can reduce customer satisfaction by up to 16%.
One example is walmart which get an increase in conversions and revenue after they increase the speed on their website, they find that visitors who receive conversions have experienced twice as fast as visitors who do not receive conversions.
How website loading speed affects visibility
After Google considers the loading speed in their search results, this also affects the ease of users in reaching a website, In December 2017, the Google search engine has changed the ranking in their search results based on sites that have mobile versions of pages.
1. Mobile devices
The fact is that over time and technology, the mobile version of search exceeds the desktop version of search, this means that Google will provide results in its search engine that prioritizes websites that have a mobile version, Google does not want to provide its search results to users with sites that do not work properly on the device. mobile.
2. User Experience (UX)
User Experience has become a factor in ranking in search engines, before this change only users in desktop users were taken into consideration so even though it had a bad experience on mobile, the website still had a chance in the search engine main page rankings, but the fact is now it it won't happen again, now the web pages that will be indexed, will be sorted by the ranking of websites that have a good experience for mobile users.
If you want to increase ranking and visibility on a website, you need to know how to reduce page load times as quickly as possible and have a responsive display on any browser or mobile device of any screen size.
What causes my website to be slow
Try to do a site speed test in tools available on the internet, such as Google Pagespeed Insight and find out how fast it takes to load a page.
Some of the common reasons why a site becomes slow can be due to the server being used, the large image size or the number of redirects within the website itself, it necessitates taking some steps to increase the speed of a site and improve a good user experience.
1. What is the best load time
According to Google, the best speed time is 3 seconds, according to the findings in the benchmark most websites are not close to it, Google found that 70% of the analyzed site pages need almost 6-7 seconds to display a visual display, there is no average of all industries they manage but what Google recommends is 3 Seconds.
2. Then how to speed up website loading
There are many factors that affect the time it takes to load a page, there are several steps you can take to make your website faster and also improve the user experience.
You don't need to spend all your time fixing all of this, do it slowly. If you've done the things we mentioned earlier, you might be thinking about what else I can do to increase the speed of my website.
Here is a list of recommendations to speed up loading a site.
1. Minify files such as CSS, Javascript and output from HTML
Before going to anything else, it would be better if we prioritize the files that are commonly used, because these files are very important for us to optimize. With so many JS and CSS files used, it will indirectly increase the number of requests to be loaded.
You can reduce the number of JS or CSS files by concatenating or minifying which can reduce the file size as well as the total files that will be requested by the site.
If the website uses a template as a UI theme, try to check whether the files used have been minified or not, maybe you think using a template will make it easier to build a website, but there are times when we have to be observant to check the contents of the codes.
Sometimes I meet some templates that have messy code, please note this is very influential in performance, by minifying means the code has removed some unnecessary parts such as formatting, spaces etc., this is important to ensure your site uses minimal resources .
Then check whether the site uses a lot of JS or CSS files, try to combine them into one, if you find CSS or JS codes not minified, you should minify now, you can use free tools on the internet to minify the CSS/JS used.
How about using Wordpress, try using a provided plugin like WPRocket for simple processing. The function of minification is to streamline the size of a CSS, JS and HTML output file.
The fewer resources used, the fewer HTTP requests required by the browser, this will load the page faster.
2. Use CDN and Async on files like CSS and Javascript
The async function is to load simultaneously, async load files can speed up site loading when the browser is making a request, if the CSS or Javascript file is not async it will stop until the file is fully loaded. You can also use the CDN to use the JS and CSS files you need, such as JQuery, Bootstrap etc.
CDN can increase loading speed by storing content used in multiple locations around the world, CDN caching is usually closer to the end user than the originating server, file requests may be thousands of miles even across multiple networks.
Using a CDN will certainly speed up the page loading process, believe me.
3. Reduce HTTP requests
Nearly 80% of opening a website is usually spent downloading lots of files such as images, layouts, scripts, etc. This HTTP request is made for each resource, the more resources requested, the longer it will take to render a page, try to detect what is being consumed a lot in this HTTP Request request by detecting it in the inspect tools in Chrome.
To need to see how many HTTP Requests are loaded on the site, in Google Chrome, right-click on your website page then select inspect and select the network tab, there will be several columns with their respective functions, the column name shows what files are loaded. and the size column shows how big the file size is.
The time column shows how long it takes to load each file, in the lower corner there is a summary of how many requests.
By reducing the number of HTTP Requests will have an impact on performance, try checking your files whether you need all the files or not at all.
4. Reduce server response time
DNS or domain name system is a database server with an associated IP address and hostname, when a user types a URL in their browser, DNS will translate that URL into an IP address indicating that the location is online, in finding a particular DNS record is like looking up a number. in a very thick phone book.
For example you visit example.com and you will type it in your browser, your ISP will do a DNS lookup to find the address associated with the URL, for example the IP address found is like 12.34.56.78, where the IP address tells where the site you are looking for is, well the amount of time it will take for this step depends on how fast your DNS provider is.
If you're using a slow DNS, which is taking longer for the browser to find your website, it's time to switch to a faster DNS provider to streamline the process.
5. Image optimization and avoid large image file sizes
Images are one of the main roles in increasing engagement, but it also greatly affects website speed. Sometimes site owners upload an image to the server without thinking about how big the size they have uploaded is, if the image file size is very high it will result in a slow loading process on a page which has an impact on an overloaded server.
Image files make up one of the largest percentages of internet traffic and often take a long time to load, that's because image files are large in size compared to other resources like CSS, JS, or HTML. This can be avoided by optimizing the image on the file size and reducing the resolution.
Many online image optimization tools are available for free, you can also avoid this by changing the size, image format, image compression using software such as Photoshop, before uploading it into the application.
And Google's recommended image format is webp or JPEG2000.
6. Reduce and limit the number of installed plugins
If the site uses a CMS such as WordPress or Joomla!, plugins become a tool to add features to the website. Plugins are a collection of code that can increase functionality, improve the user experience in a CMS.
However, too many plugins can actually cause some problems that will occur, some of the plugins used can make the website slow or can cause crashes.
It's a good idea to use a plugin, evaluate it first and update it regularly, and remove the plugin if it causes the site to be slow, just use a few essential plugins.
You can evaluate by trying to selectively disable plugins, and measure your site's load process through online tools such as GTMetrix, Pingdom, Genelify etc. This may be quite tedious, but the results will show the difference between each installed plugin and you can determine which plugin is worth using.
7. Reduce the use of resources from outside or third parties
Although JS and CSS files are often the cause of slow website performance it's not the only one, there are many third party integrations that you might use, you can identify all external scripts by opening developer tools from google chrome.
For example, in a blog comment using the Gravatar service, you might notice that the images loaded can affect the amount of load on the page, without realizing this can increase the number of HTTP requests on the website.
Some of these additional features can add milliseconds to the loading process, if any of the third-party app integrations have an impact on speed and performance, we recommend removing them and leaving them.
Knowing what features are added at load time can help you make a decision on which third-party feature to choose.
8. Choose a hosting that is professional and according to your needs
Most of the new website owners may prefer cheap hosting options, the selection of the type of server can affect the performance of the site, you should be wise in determining the server package to be used. Generally the servers offered have 3 different options namely:
1. Shared hosting
Shared Hosting is the cheapest option you can get at an affordable price, although there is no problem with websites with low traffic, shared hosting can keep up with spikes in traffic on high-volume websites, maybe websites that are slow due to high spikes on other users using the same servers.
That's because Shared Hosting shares resources such as CPU, Disk Space, RAM with other users on the same server with you.
2. Dedicated server
Dedicated Hosting is a dedicated server which has a lot of space with full control over the server used, but with dedicated hosting, you also need to be extra hard to configure and manage technically. However, this can be overcome by asking an expert to configure the server.
If the website is already at a point where traffic can slow down your server response time, it's time to switch to a VPS or from a VPS to a Dedicated Server.
3. VPS hosting
With VPS Hosting, you can still share a server with others, but you have special access that shared hosting does not have from the server resources used, this is the best choice among other options.
9. Enable GZip compression right away
The smaller the file size, the faster the page will load. Compressing files is the easiest way to reduce the loading time process and currently compression with GZip is commonplace, if you haven't enabled this feature on your hosting, do it right away.
GZip is a file format or software application that basically puts a string of code in a file to temporarily replace it with a smaller document size, usually this will have an impact on CSS, JS and HTML, because usually these three documents have repeating code and spaces.
90% of the traffic from the internet goes through a browser that supports GZip, this is the best way to speed up the loading process of the site. If the application uses WordPress, the WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache plugins can be an option to support GZip activation.
And if the website used is a static website, you need to activate it in .htaccess if you use Apache, you can add it with code like the following:
<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
</ifModule> And if the web server uses NGINX, just add in the nginx.conf file like:
gzip on;
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";
gzip_vary on;
gzip_types text/plain text/css text/javascript image/svg+xml image/x-icon application/javascript application/x-javascript; | Sumber: CatatanWeb.com | 10 Tips Penting Untuk Mempercepat Loading Situs Web - CatatanWeb.com
10. Monitor website performance from time to time
As you continue to work on increasing page speed, it would be nice to continue to monitor any changes from time to time, as we have seen from this post there are many factors that affect website speed performance so they can change at any time.
Monitoring regularly can solve any problems that occur on the website as early as possible and keep the website in good and maximum condition.
Conclusion
Optimization of a website is very influential in all aspects including the Google search engine, if you are the owner of a website related to business, e-commerce or other services, this must be a top priority in the performance of a website that is useful for visitor satisfaction in browsing your website comfortably. and fast.
