Does Website Speed Matters For Conversion? ... Yes, It Does

Web optimization is an important part of web development and website maintenance. However, this is something always overlooked by the developers and not given much consideration. Optimization of the website when done properly can result in increased traffic and readership.

Here, let’s have a look at a few tips for website optimization:

Reduce the HTTP requests:

Mostly the web page’s load time is spent downloading various parts of a web page, like images, stylesheets, scripts, flash, etc. Hence, making an HTTP request of each of these components will result in longer loading time of the page. Try and keep minimum and important elements on the webpage instead of cluttering it with a number of features or functionalities and streamline them. Ensure to use CSS instead of images where possible. For multiple stylesheets, combine it into one, also do not forget to reduce the scripts and put them at the bottom of the page.

Enable compression:

The larger the page, the more time it will take to download. The large pages are mostly 100  kb or more, that means they are bulky and slow to load. Therefore the best way to speed their load time is to zip them by a technique called compression. Compressing the pages can reduce its bandwidth, as a result, reducing the HTTP response. This is an important step as about 90% of the internet users come through browsers that support Gzip.

Enabling browser caching:

Caching basically means, when a certain website is visited by a user the elements on the pages are saved on the hard drive in the cache, for the browser to load the page without having to send a HTTP request to the server, the next time the site is visited. According to a survey about 40-60% of daily visitors visit a website with an empty cache, therefore it is critical to make the page load faster for these first timers. However, caching also needs to be enabled for subsequent visits.

Optimize images:

Large sized images taken longer than usual to load, hence it is important to keep the images as small as possible to avoid slower loading time. Ensure to crop images to its correct size before including it in a web page. Reduce its color depth to the lowest and also remember to remove the comments from the image.

Following the above mentioned tips can help optimize the site for faster loading and increased traffic to the website.

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