Co-Founder Taliferro
Introduction
When was the last time you heard about a company losing over one and a half billion dollars on its home page? The answer is never. Amazon is not only the largest online retailer in the world but also one of the most successful companies within e-commerce. Amazon has over 100 million products for sale, making billions every year due to their popularity among consumers. If you go onto any website that sells products, chances are good that they will have an affiliate link which means they're trying to make money off your clicks and purchases.
Page load
Page load is the time it takes for a web page to load completely. It's measured in seconds and can be measured by tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and WebPagetest. As you might imagine, page speed is essential for commerce sites because it impacts how quickly you can complete your order and get what you bought delivered to your door. Pages that take too long to load create an uncomfortable user experience that makes customers leave and go elsewhere, which means lost sales for the business owner.
Why does page speed time matters
- It can affect your customer engagement, conversion rates, and sales
- It can affect your search engine ranking
- It can affect your bounce rate
- It can affect your mobile experience
- It can affect your brand
Page load speed is a measure of how quickly your webpage loads. The page speed tool in Chrome gives you a score of 100; the lower the score, the slower your page will load.
The faster a page loads, the more likely visitors will stay on your website and continue interacting with it instead of clicking away to another site (or even just closing their browser altogether).
Speed up your website
Consider using a CDN to make your site faster if you have a WordPress website. If your site is hosted on Amazon AWS and has a lot of traffic, you might consider moving it off the free tier and onto the paid tier.
If you are not on Amazon AWS, but would still like to make your site faster, consider adding some caching plugins, such as W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket.
The best way to speed up any website without paying for anything is by not loading unnecessary things that don't add value for users. We must minimize:
- Requests - Avoid having too many stylesheets or scripts loaded at once; this makes switching between pages slower because more connections are being made
- Plugins - The fewer plugins there are running on the front end (i.e., those that visitors can see), the better
- Redirects - Don't use redirects unless they're necessary (for example, if you have an old URL with no 301 redirects)
- Third parties - Avoid third-party scripts as much as possible; they're often slower than serving content directly from your own servers
Minimize the cost of a slow site
When building a website, there are many things to consider when making your site fast. You can optimize images, minify code and decrease latency using a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
Let's say an average product has 20 elements; then, we have 20 HTTP requests per page! That's already 8 million HTTP requests per day just for one site! Imagine if all websites had such high numbers. Our browser would never get any work done because it would be busy loading pages repeatedly (or at least until someone visited).
Conclusion
If you're running a business, you want your site to be as fast and efficient as possible. A slow website can hurt your business by reducing conversions, increasing bounce rates, and driving users away. By following the tips mentioned, you'll be able to keep your visitors happy while saving some money along the way!
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