How to check the speed of the site load and make it faster

How to check the speed of the site load and make it fasterAccording to Akamai Technologies, 53% of visitors close the site if it is loaded for more than 3 seconds. The delay of only 2 seconds reduces the conversion of the page by 37%.

And how much does your site load?

Slow loading is the first thing that forces potential customers to go to competitors. Even a beautiful picture and a clear interface will not keep the user, because he simply will not wait for them. And you will lose possible profit.

Why, and most importantly – how to check the speed of loading the page and make it faster? Let’s understand.

How Site Acceleration Increases Sales

Less bounce. The faster the page opened, the more likely that the user will remain on the site. DoubleClick, a subsidiary of Google, compared mobile resources with the opening time of 5 and 19 seconds. When loading 5 seconds, the failure rate is 35% less.

More depth of views. If the site “flies”, the user will probably view more than one page at a time. Let’s return to comparison of sites which open for 5 and 19 seconds. When loading 5 seconds, one session lasts an average of 70% longer.

The involvement of users directly affects profit. Employees of the Financial Times conducted an experiment. Part of the focus group viewed articles on the site in normal mode, and part – with a delay of 1 to 5 seconds. The longer the pages opened, the less the session lasted. As a result, readers saw fewer promotional materials and also did not want to issue a paid subscription – and these are the two main sources of the newspaper’s revenue.

Higher conversion. Online sales research from Akamai Technologies also showed that pages with high conversion load on average 26% faster. Acceleration is not the only way to increase the conversion of an online store or a lending. But even just losing in speed, you miss potential customers.

Still do not believe that the speed of the site depends on your income?

Then here’s an anecdote for a million dollars in the truest sense of the word.

When the technical director of AliExpress Dongbai Guo reported to his boss that the loading time of the pages was reduced by 36%, he replied: “Well done. And what is the loading time of the pages? “. Then the technical director said that as a result, the number of placed orders increased by 10.5%. And the boss replied: “What?! How did you do that?!”.

Therefore, do not underestimate the speed of downloading the site – it can significantly increase sales.

Why speed affects the progress

The position of the site in search engines depends on how quickly the pages work. According to the official Google blog, less than 1% of the resources are ranked by the speed of displaying pages, so this is not the main criterion. Nevertheless, both Google can check the speed of the site’s download.

Note that the search engine omits resources that are considered less useful, with high failure rates, low depth of view, and so on. Checking the site for speed will help improve these indicators and, accordingly, the results of promotion.

Do you want to know how to increase the flow of customers from Google? Then read our article: 8 tools that increase the search traffic by 2 times.

What speed do you need?

According to the research all the same Akamai Technologies, the highest conversion – the pages with the download time of 1.8 seconds on the desktop 2.7 seconds on the mobile version. And the lowest failure rate was for pages that opened in 1 second on the desktop and 0.7 seconds on the mobile version.

So, what result should the site check for speed?

<1 second – perfect!
1-2 seconds – great!
3-5 seconds – there is much to strive for!
5-10 seconds – you need to improve!
≥10 seconds – very bad!

But the correct speed is faster than the others. The New York Times claims that there is enough difference in 0.25 seconds when downloading so that people prefer one site to another. If you lose in speed, then you will not have time to blink (literally!), As potential customers will pass to competitors.

Top-5 tools for analyzing the speed of site downloads

Resources for assessing the speed on the Internet are so many that it is difficult to choose which one to use. We analyzed the popular instruments and made up our top five.

  1. Pingdom
  2. Which Loads Faster?
  3. Neustar
  4. Load Impact
  5. Google PageSpeed ​​Insights

How to increase the speed of the site load from Google PageSpeed ​​Insights

Optimize the graphics. At the end of the check you will get a list of images that you can reduce manually or download already optimized photos and pictures.
Simplify the code. The analysis will show where you can shorten the HTML, CSS and JavaScript code – remove unnecessary spaces, comments, etc. Like images, you can reduce the code manually or download optimized.
Use browser cache. In this case, the browser will save all the site files on the computer, and the next time the pages load faster.
Enable compression. If you use gzip-compression, this will reduce the amount of data 4-5 times, and the download speed, respectively, will increase.
Speed ​​up server response time. Ideally, it should not exceed 0.2 seconds. To accurately analyze the speed of the server’s response, use a special tool, for example Pingdom.
Following the instructions, you will make the site faster, but at the same time you can damage functionality or appearance. For example, too compressed images will lose quality. To avoid bending the stick, consult a technical expert.

Conclusion

You learned about tools that will not only check, but also help increase the speed of site load. And as a result – and the profit of your business. After all, only 1 second of acceleration can add + 2% to the conversion.

Image credit: bibin9363pbr

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