Your Website Loading speed can boost or kill your sales

Is it possible that your website loading speed is directly affecting your revenue? Is it possible that the longer it takes for your website to load, the harder it knocks down your sales? 

Well, the truth is, yes. The sales through your website and your website load speed are directly connected. Buckle up. In this article you will learn how sales and website load speed are connected and what you can do to make your site loads faster.

Stats: A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversion. This means, if an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

Now, the question is,  how does the website load speed affects my my sales? How can it even be a problem?

According to stats, in a study made by Google back in 2012, most smartphone users were willing to wait 5 seconds for a website to load  before moving on to another website. Do you think people are more or less patient today than they were back in 2012?

In 2018, in another research made by Google, 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Those statistics also apply for other search engines. 


The more people bounce off your website, the more Google is going penalize it. Recently Google came up with a self-learning algorithm update ” that focuses on user’s experience on your website.

If you are placed #2 on the search result page, and a user clicks on your website, bounces off after 4 seconds, and moves to the next website and spends 10 seconds,

the algorithm will deduct that the website #3 provides more value and a better experience for the user and will put that website (#3) above yours, and the lower you are on the search result page. Now you will get less traffic, and the less traffic, the lower will be your sales. 

And to top it off, Google rolled out a new page speed update to their algorithm in July 2018. This makes speed a critical factor for everyone… needless to say how important it is. 

Designers sometimes only think about the layout of the website, because, to most of them, the layout is your first impression on the website visitor. But, they get it all wrong, The layout of a website is super important, it reflects your professionalism and builds confidence, yet, with all that importance, it comes in second position. The website has to load fast enough for the user to get to see your beautiful layout. 

How to Increase Your Website Speed

If you are wondering how to increase the speed of your website, check out this article on how to increase website load speed.
It is recommended that your website load speed stays under 5 seconds. The lower you can go, the better. 
As promised, now we are going to dive into what you can do to make your website loads faster. 

1 – Optimize Media Files (Pictures, Videos, etc…)

  •  It is recommended to have your website size up to 500KB, but as a designer, I know that it is hard to keep a modern designed website under 500KB. The bottom line is, you need to keep your images under 1MB (1000KB). If it is more than 1MB, it will surely slow down the website

How to reduce your file size:

  • 1- You can use multiple online software like 

https://compressjpeg.com/

  • Note that the website can be more than 500KB and still load under 5 seconds. 
      Example:

      – GT Metrix: Total Page Size: 680KB, Fully Loaded Time: 1.0 Seconds

  •  – Neil Patel: Total Page Size: 453KB, Fully Load Time: 2.0 seconds

  • – Our Agency Xion Thrive LLC: Total Page Size: 1.18MB, Fully Load Time: 2.5

2- Minimize CSS and Javascript Files

If you are not a technical person, this might spin your head a little. But this is important at the time. 


Here is an explanation for non-technical person like me. Your beautiful website is created by a bunch of codes that look like this (Picture) sometimes. For each web page of your website, there is a specific page of code, and among all those code pages, there are sections of codes that are common across those pages. 
So, instead of including the same code on every page, put all those common CSS rules or Javascript into just one file.
That way, the document can be loaded just one time, and, when you load the other pages, it will just refer to the script or stylesheet previously downloaded. 

You can use multiple tools like

Asset Cleanup Plugin

SG Optimizer Plugin

All though to be able to use the  SG optimizer plugin, you need to have your website hosted on SiteGround. 

3- Optimize Server Response Time

There are lots of things involved in optimizing your server response time because it is affected by so many things, like your hosting platform, software that your server uses, and how much traffic you receive on your website. Your server response time should be around 200ms.

 For traffic volume, you need to analyze how much traffic you are getting. For that, you can use Google Search Console. If you are receiving way more traffic than your hosting plan can handle, you need to upgrade, because not having adequate memory can even get your website down. 

For the Hosting Platform, everyone has their preference. I personally used multiple ones. I didn’t know how bad the previous ones were before I started using the one I am using now. I could never get a website to fully load under 3 seconds, but now, it is an easy task. My hosting provider is Siteground. (I am not an affiliate, that is my honest report) If you want to read more about it, read this awesome article by MOZ (Link)

4- Reduce Redirects

Make sure your website doesn’t redirect too much.  Every time your website redirects to another internal page, your visitor will encounter additional time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete. For example: If your website redirect pattern looks like this: “website.com -> www.website.com -> p.website.com ->m.website.com/home” each of those additional redirects will make your page load slower.

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