It can be a frustrating process trying to deliver a satisfactory customer experience for those visiting your website. But how can your business do that if the website itself takes several seconds to open? Any website linked to a business when taking more than 3 seconds to load loses about 53% of its customers, especially ones using their phones to browse.
In today’s fast-paced digital world, Web Design and Development Companies can safely assume that every visitor is an impatient one. There are only so many seconds that people are willing to spend staring at the loading page screen, before moving on to a different website. They literally lose interest owing to shorter attention spans caused by a stress-filled environment. The average waiting time is between 3-5 seconds, and you as a business need to cater to this expected loading speed.
Loading Speed Impact on SEO
Let us assume that you are a trusted brand and some of your loyal customers are actually fine with waiting the few extra seconds. But did you know, that slow website loading speed can actually affect your SEO? This can cause serious damage to attracting potential new buyers.
Google’s algorithms include a site loading speed factor to feature them in the Search Engine Result Pages. Less number of visitors are retained on slow-loading sites, which is another algorithm factor. It will therefore bury the website under the faster loading sites, so as to ensure that the visitor has a positive user experience.
So what are Web Design and Development Companies doing to decrease Loading time?
- Compress Images
A page that is dumped with High-Resolution images will surely take its own sweet time to open. In most cases even after the website has opened, the images may not get displayed, affecting the visual quality of the page. There are several online tools like Resizeimage.net that help you to crop or compress the actual image into a smaller version. Images that are in .png format can be converted to compressed .jpeg images without any outright visible deterioration in the details. This simple adjustment will considerably lower the website or webpage loading time.
- Custom Templates
Businesses, especially Start-ups, tend to choose Template Themes for their websites. However, the templates contain a lot of features that may not be relevant to your needs. These features slow down your website considerably, putting off potential customers. It is always advisable to build a custom website that very specifically caters to your business requirements with the help of a Web Design and Development Company.
- Image Carousels or Sliders
Image carousels are no doubt an attractive feature on a website. The website loading speed is improved just by removing non-essential image sliders, as they are potential image dumping grounds.
- Reduce Redirects
A high volume of internal and external linking can confuse the web search engine with too many redirects. Cutting down on the links, to only essential and SEO friendly ones can decrease loading time. Simplify the redirect by manipulating the content placement on your site.
There are tools from Google, namely, Google Page Speed Insights that actually help in identifying which redirects are active and which have become obsolete.
- Opt for a Content Delivery Network
CDN’s essentially spread your data making it accessible to global users via their local servers. The location proximity also accounts for faster loading speeds.
- Using Caches
Instead of dynamically loading the web pages each time a user creates a web request, you can create caches of your page. Several online content management systems cache the latest versions of the web pages in plugins to be pulled up instantly, saving loading time.
The Loading Speed of your site affects the conversion rate of visitors to buyers. Take some time to analyse how long it takes for your website to load and why it takes that long. The above-mentioned factors are broad solutions to loading speed problems. Open Designs, the Best Web Design, and Development company in Chennai offer strategized, custom solutions to improving Website Loading speed.