Stay Ahead in the Website Speed Game: Tips and Tricks for Faster Loading Websites

Are you wondering how to stay ahead in Website Speed Game? 🤔

Website Speed Matters! We all have heard this for a long time, but now in this decade, it will be even more critical than expected for website-first businesses. Considering the telecom innovations, Devices computation power optimisations and Gen-Z, website speed will require a massive makeover in the coming years.

I remember visiting an e-commerce website, which took around 3 sec to load on my mobile device. The product offering on the Website was similar to what I was looking to purchase, and I bought that product. The whole process from discovery to checkout took at most 10 secs. The only reason I bought that product from that Website is that the speed and Accessibility of the Website were super smooth, unlike the other websites having a load time of 10-20 secs on mobile devices with the same product.

Website Speed Impacts the Conversion Rate

As per the research and the studies from the last couple of years, below are some statistics that one should know if they are vested in Website first business:

• A site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.
• A site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 5x higher than a site that loads in 10 seconds.
• A site that loads in 1 second has an e-commerce conversion rate 2.5x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.
• A site that loads in 1 second has an e-commerce conversion rate 1.5x higher than a site that loads in 10 seconds.

As you can see from the above image, if any website takes more than 5 secs to load, conversion is already minimised by more than 20%, which is half of a fast website.

As per the above data, the e-commerce conversion rate decreases by an average of 0.3% for every additional second it takes for your website to load.

A Quick mathematical reason for revenue lost because of the website speed

Consider If 1,000 people visit your Website to buy a $50 product. This could demonstrate the difference in your potential revenues:

• A 1 second page load time at a 3.05% conversion rate results in $1,525
• A 2-second page load time at a 1.68% conversion rate results in $840
• A 3-second page load time at a 1.12% conversion rate results in $560
• A 4-second page load time at a 2.93% conversion rate results in $335

In nearly 4 seconds, potential sales have dropped by just over $1,190.

Multiply that across more visitors to the Website looking at potentially higher-priced products and services, which results in significant gaps in potential revenue.

What's the reason for the slow website speed?
 

A slow website speed happens widely due to varying buyers/visitor personas. You can read more about why website performance varies here; in my last article, I demonstrated the same.

Below are the points that can be culprits for slow website speed, they are:

1. Large or unoptimized images and videos
2. Too many scripts and plugins running on the Website
3. Poorly coded or outdated website technology
4. Lack of a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
5. Limited server resources or poor hosting service
6. High traffic or too many concurrent users accessing the Website
7. The browser or device compatibility issues
8. Varying visitor personas, etc

We at Auditzy™ have been researching the same space for the last 2 years and found some stimulating pointers which are the real culprits for slow websites. Those are:

• The same Website can act differently for different visitors; yes, you read that right!
• Visitor Network plays an important role when they visit any website
• Visitor Device and Operating System also plays a vital role as far as website speed is considered
• Visitor Location is also an essential factor for slow website speeds
• Technology Selection contributes to more than 50% of the slow website speed

How to Optimise Website Speed?

One crucial point that we have observed over time during our research is that,

You can not optimise website speed for every visitors, but you can always optimise for the personas of the website visitors

In the above Image, you can see how website experience will vary for different personas. For example,

If you have an e-commerce website experiencing traffic from 3G fast and 4G networks and the devices are like iphone 11/12/13, Samsung Galaxy S8, One Plus Pro etc., and their Location is Mumbai, and these segments contribute for the majority of the revenue, then optimise your website speed for this segment first rather than optimising for all.

How to stay popular among your visitors?

The coming days will be very tough for the e-commerce website because we will have Gen-Z, who are digital natives who love speed and will barely return once they have a bad UX in terms of speed.

Mobile app installation rates for the brands will decrease because there will be many brands, and installing apps for 1st-time purchases will only make sense once you have the user's trust.

Below is my suggestion that we have done for some of our clients to stay popular in the website speed world:

• Start using Website Performance Management Tools like Auditzy to create and optimise personas for your website. Currently, we have 5000+ buyer/visitor personas.
• Audit & Monitor your competitor to understand where exactly they are in this space. With Auditzy, you can perform apple-to-apple comparisons at many atomic data points.
• Gather as much data as possible for various personas, cross-validate it will GA (Google Analytics), and optimise your web page accordingly.
• Switch to New-gen tech architectures like Headless Commerce, Composable Commerce, and JAMstack to stay ahead of the crowd.
• Website Performance Data will be king in the next 5 years, so start gathering web performance data as per the personas that may come in the future and be future-proof by investing in research & development; otherwise, your website will be just another website on the internet.
• Understand both Lab Data and Field Data for your website's different pages. It will help you in increasing CTRs.
• Develop website visitors so they can feel value and trust the website for recurring visits.

Audit your website across personas with Auditzy today!

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