Imagine scrolling through your feed and landing on a page that takes ages to load. How likely are you to stick around? Google says most of your users bounce off if the load time is greater than 3sec. It’s scary, but it's a reality for many businesses with slow websites.
The truth is, slow websites can cost you serious business. Customers are impatient, and they expect instant gratification. If your website doesn’t match their speed, they'll bounce and find a competitor. But there's a solution that can dramatically speed up performance, boost traffic, and turn more visitors into paying customers.
It's called website speed optimisation. I know you must have heard this term before but do you really know what it means? If not, let’s find out!
What is Website Optimisation?
Web optimisation is about increasing your website accessibility and making your site work better in key areas like attracting visitors, boosting conversions, and improving usability.
The main goal is to create a smooth and enjoyable experience for anyone who visits your site. When your website runs smoothly and meets users’ needs, it turns first-time visitors into happy, loyal customers who keep coming back.
Benefits of Website Optimisation
Web optimisation offers several valuable benefits:
1. Drive Traffic: Improve your content and technical SEO to be more visible on search engines so that site visitors can find you without paid efforts.
2. Improve Brand Visibility and Awareness: More traffic = more eyes which means another possibility to give exposure to your brand and relate with pertinent content in front of the right target audience.
3. Convert Traffic into Revenue: The more traffic your website attracts, the higher are chances that it will also convert. Optimising your content and user experience better prepares visitors to become paying customers.
4. Boost Brand Reputation: When a website is super-optimised and user-friendly, it benefits the moral of visitors that in return will uplift your brand impression assisting you make repetitive customers.
Why Website Speed Optimisation is Important?
Why does site speed matter? A site that takes ages to load creates an annoying user experience, so they would rather leave, plummeting traffic and depressing your search results. Google ranks faster sites higher on the search results, so if your site is lagging then Google will not help you much in terms of visitor volume.
Furthermore, a sluggish site is bad for user experience and contributes to lower online sales turnover because users are unhappy browsing it.
Thus a great UI/UX design is extremely important because this can lead to a higher conversion rate and improved user experience which are both good signals in the eyes of Google. So, let us now see this in detail.
1. Conversion Rate: How quickly your site loads will impact how many users make it through the process of converting, e.g., making a purchase. This is another one of the giant benefits that a faster site gives apart from making users stay for more duration which in turn delivers higher conversion rates too.
2. Bounce Rate: It is the percent of users who visit just a single page. Anything that causes a page to take longer than 3-4 seconds is liable for driving users away.
3. Search engine optimisation (SEO): Google ranks fast-loading websites higher in searches, especially for those of you googling on mobile. A faster site can improve your visibility on Google, bringing in more traffic.
4. User Experience: Loading times too slow and users flee the scene. A speedy site makes users happier and more engaged, which improves the overall UX.
In short, faster sites perform better in almost every way—from keeping users engaged to boosting sales and improving search rankings.
How to Improve Website Speed?
We know all about the importance of website speed, but how do you actually increase your site performance?
- Reducing the size of images on your website
Image optimisation includes reducing image sizes for faster website performance. You should also limit the use of files that have a high resolution because such images could make your page load slower.
Specify sizes for responsive images, so the browser can choose the best resolution image based upon width and viewport size. JPEG for detailed photos, and PNG for more simple graphics.
Use tools like ImageOptim, JPEGmini or Kraken to compress your images and shrink those file sizes without losing quality.
Having done those processes, you could use HTML attributes such as srcset and sizes to make your images automatically adjust its size depending on what device that user is using, ensuring faster load times and a smoother user experience.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Now, what exactly is a CDN? A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of web servers spread across different locations worldwide. These servers work together to deliver web content to users based on their geographical location.
When your website is hosted on a single server, all visitor requests are sent to that one server, which can slow down response times, especially if users are far from the server’s location.
A CDN automatically routes user requests to the server closest to them. This means content is served quicker, adding up to the cumulative speed plus performance of your website. CDNs can be expensive, but they do a great job of speeding up load times and improving the user experience
- Go for a new Web Hosting Solution
If you are using shared hosting, which has a tendency to be slow due to its sharing of resources, then upgrading your hosting plan should definitely boost your speed.
You can opt for VPS, which offers better speed with more dedicated resources, or dedicated hosting, which provides the best performance by giving you an entire server for your site.
Serverless hosting is the other option, it offers a scalable, inexpensive solution where you only pay for what you use. Measure your performance before making any changes to know if you really need an upgrade.
- Implement GZIP compression
GZIP is a widely used file compression standard that can reduce the amount of data transferred over the Internet by up to 70%.
This significant reduction in data dramatically improves website speed, making it a key tool for enhancing performance.
The fastest way to speed up your website is by enabling gzip compression on your web server. Gzip compresses certain types of files, usually text-based ones, making them smaller.
This reduces the amount of data sent to users, which shortens load times and saves bandwidth.
- Reduce the number of plugins
Plugins add extra features to your website but can also slow it down. Every plugin usually loads more CSS and JavaScript files, causing your server to perform even more operations that can end up increasing the time it takes for a request to be processed.
Go back to your list of plugins and if a plugin is not necessary on the site remove it in order for your website to load faster. Uninstalling unnecessary plugins reduces the excess load on the server resulting in a performance boost.
Types of website optimisation tools
You can use a variety of website optimisation tools to make various elements of your site better, often without spending a dime. Here are six main types of tools to consider:
- Page Speed Tools: Page speed tools help you measure how fast your site loads and give suggestions on what to do to compress files, cache content, or use faster servers. Some of them are Pagespeed Insights and Gtmterix.
- SEO Tools: Increase your website’s search visibility on search engines (e.g. Google). It also offers keyword research, rank tracking, on-page SEO audits and more. The widely used versions of these are Google Search Console, Ahrefs and Moz.
- UX Optimisation Tools: Enhance user experience by identifying behaviour of users through usability testing and heatmaps. Tools like Hotjar and UserTesting are designed to show you where visitors are falling flat, why it's happening, and how to make your site more user-friendly.
- CRO Tools: Understand user behaviour and test various elements of your pages to increase the number (%) of visitors who execute desired actions on your site (i.e. make a purchase). Google Analytics and Hotjar are two most used for this.
- Mobile Optimisation Tools: Ensure your website looks and works well on mobile devices. You can use tools like Google Mobile-Friendly Test, PageSpeed Insights and others to check your page load speed.
- Accessibility Tools: Keep in mind that your site should work even for the most disabled people. These tools assess the performance of your site for those with disabilities and offer advice on how you can make it more accessible.
Make it simpler with the right web development partner!
A good and speed optimised website design depends majorly on the factors such as your past web development experience, market understanding, tech and coding know-how, knowledge about the latest trends and competitor analysis.
If you have the right skills, nothing can stop you from creating your own masterpiece. However, if you have limited grip over any of these elements, don’t hesitate in hiring a right web development partner for making your site creation journey simpler and serene.
Take a brief about the estimated website design and development cost and the scope of work to match it with your finances and once everything’s settled, you are all set to get your website developed by some of the highly experienced industry experts, while you can relax and focus on your other business operations.
The Bottom Line
A faster website means a better user experience. When your website loads quickly, visitors are more likely to stay, explore, and ultimately convert. It's a simple equation: speed equals satisfaction, and satisfaction equals sales.
The other side of the coin is as internet speeds have grown so far do user expectations; slow-loading sites are no longer something anyone has patience for.
If you think your website is lagging behind in terms of performance, it’s time to call out to the website development experts. At Enterprise Monkey, we make sure your website is optimised for speed, SEO, usability, and accessibility to enhance user experience.