You’ve heard people talking about it, but you haven’t taken action to reduce your site’s load times… Why not?
Are long load times costing you sales?
Many webmasters overlook the importance of maintaining a fast website, assuming it has little-to-no impact on their conversions. But long load times can and will influence consumers’ buying decisions, more so than you may realize.
To put the importance of speed into perspective, Amazon conducted a study a couple years back in which it found that for every 100ms of additional latency, it lost 1% in sales. A single percentage point may not seem like much, but Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, meaning that just 100ms of latency can literally cost millions of dollars in lost sales.
So, what steps can you take to speed up your website?
Cut Down on Flash Animations
While they may look nice, Flash animations can add some serious latency to your website. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should avoid them altogether, but rather keep them to a minimum. Cluttering your website with a Flash-based intro, Flash ads, Flash pop-ups, and other Flash elements can take a toll on visitors’ bandwidth, slowing down their load times to a crawl.
Choose a Reputable Host
Your choice of web host will also play a role in your website’s speed. Opting for a cheap shared plan by some fly-by-night hosting company will likely come back to haunt you. Sure, you may save a couple of bucks initially, but you’ll lose far more in terms of visitors and sales. Spend the extra money by signing up for good hosting plan from a reputable, trusted web host.
Enable GZIP Compression
Wouldn’t it be great if you could compress your website’s files instead of forcing visitors to download the original, oversized file? Well you can, thanks to a special type of compression technology known as GZIP. Using this technology, you can compress large pages so they are smaller, and thus take less time to download. According to Yahoo, GZIP can reduce download times by as much as 70%.
To enable GZIP compression, add the following code to your site’s .htaccess file:
# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
# Or, compress certain file types by extension:
<files *.html>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</files>
Pro Tip: You should be cautious when editing your .htaccess file and save a backup before making any edits. If you don’t feel comfortable making these changes, hire someone who knows what they are doing. For more detailed information about how to edit your .htaccess file click here.
Enable Browser Caching
Browser caching allows visitors to store parts of a website locally within their web browser rather than downloading the entire page/file each time they attempt to access it. If you are using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, you can download one of the many browser caching plugins for your website, such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. If your website doesn’t feature a CMS, you can enable browser caching via the .htaccess file.
