The modern day man or woman lacks patience, but what every generation has in common is that we all have a particularly low tolerance when it comes to slow technology.
We all expect and demand products to perform at lightning speeds for us at all times. This development of impatience and high expectations has only put greater demands on web design capabilities; an area that has been overlooked for some time is the loading speed of pages.
Through analytical reports and user analysis we are able to identify that individuals have no time for slow websites. Due to clear-cut evidence in support of fast loading times, search engines such as Google are applying further pressure onto business owners to ensure that their web pages load quickly.
As a business and website owner it is the combined responsibility of you and your web designer to ensure that your website loads as quickly as possible for its intended users. Evidence suggests that the average website visitor spends 7 seconds on a web page and in most instances those users leave to find another website. This is why it’s so important that your web pages are designed and worded to engage and retain visitors before they leave to go someplace else. Remember that people tend to surf the web, but as business owners we do not want people to surf the web. We want them to stop and to do business with us.
If your web page takes two or three seconds to load this inevitably means that your web page needs to be far more captivating that almost every other as you will be limited to just three to four seconds for that page to spark an interest with the user.
Rather than looking into an almost endless list of possible ways in which you can retain and convert website visitors more effectively, it’s often best to first focus on enhancing the page speed of your website. Many web designers tend to overlook this aspect of the web and the overall user experience that your website delivers even though it’s such an important aspect for your business.
Search engines such as Google even provide you with Page Speed Testing Tools to identify how quickly your website loads. It also provides suggestions and advice on what you can do to increase the websites loading speed. It’s important to bear in mind that every web page within your website is likely to achieve a unique score and its own loading speed since every page will contain a different level of content and code.
Optimisation techniques could include; enhanced code and scripting, a decrease in files stored on the web page, a decrease in queries sent to and from the database and optimisation of images by formatting them for web.
You should soon notice an increase in website visitor retention, conversion rates as well as more new website visitors as its likely that your website will rank far higher within search.
Enhancing the page loading times within your website is just one step of many that you can make to increase the overall user experience. Take time to increase your websites page loading speed and to look into any other areas that would enable your users to navigate around and load your web pages more quickly.