It seems rather simple: the faster that an individual can engage with your brand, the more likely it becomes that he or she will follow through on the actions you desire. While this is not a universal guarantee and your brand certainly must strive to provide a superior product or service in order to gain serious traction, website speed is at the heart of what drives the most successful websites’ conversion tactics. With clear connections between search engine optimization, page loading times and overall website speeds, it is also necessary in a world of ever-increasing SEO difficulty. For those who want to get the most mileage out of their next big promotions, there is something to be gained by optimizing your overall speed. In the following article, we will discuss how you can increase your chances for success in this regard.

The Metrics

Various studies and data-sets have been analyzed to determine what effect website speed has on conversions. While there are always outliers to be considered, a clear trend can be observed. For instance, a website that fully loads within five seconds is statistically likely to enjoy thirty percent more conversions than a site that takes three times that long to load. When you are pinging URLs to search engines, you must take into account not just the act of facilitating those links, but the effects that a slow page will have on how users interact with your brand or business. The analysis is in and there is clear incentive to reduce page loading times when dealing with conversion potential.

How to Achieve This

There are several different tactics that web masters can utilize to decrease page loading times, but not all will work for everyone. A professionally-designed website may already be objectively fast enough to avoid any negative impacts in regards to conversion rates, but most web masters can optimize several elements to gain additional traction. The most important area in which you can make the most gains is through the reduction of overall page file sizes. The larger that your individual pages are, the longer on average it will take for browsers to display them. Even a 200 millisecond improvement on page loading times can have a noticeable effect on your overall conversion rates.

When it comes to compressing images (a large part of most pages’ file sizes), opt for JPEG files over PNG files – in many cases, JPEGs can be up to 90% smaller than PNGs. Further alterations to the quality of the JPEG file can squeeze out additional space-saving optimization, allowing you to still display a high-quality image without the need for megabytes of data. Each image and page can also be optimized further by reducing or eliminating unnecessary meta data that is contained in each file.

Conclusion

Whether you are pinging URLs or asking for subscription information, conversions are the lifeblood of many websites. It is important that you reduce the overall page loading times for each page in order to gain maximum conversion potential in the long-run. You can accomplish this by reducing the number of images, shrinking or altering the file type of each image and cleaning up various lines of code on your website. Even though it may seem silly, the impact of such a small element like page loading speed has a profound impact on your conversion potential!