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How to improve your site speed and increase conversions

Upperdog
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5 mins

For e-commerce businesses, turning website traffic into conversions is crucial. Engaging potential customers is a major component of keeping them on your site long enough to make a purchase. There are many ways to streamline the customer journey to maximise conversions. One of the most important is the quality of your web design. If you are finding that you’re getting lots of traffic but very little sales, it is probably worth hiring a website design agency to investigate this issue for you.  

The downfall of a lot of e-commerce businesses is their website page speed which can have a massive effect on conversions. As a website design agency, we know how to optimise websites to create a seamless user experience – read our simple guide for improving your site speed and increasing conversions.  

Why is site speed important?

To understand why website load speeds are so important to conversions you must look at it from a customer’s point of view. Everyone has at some point experienced the frustration of trying to navigate through a slow or broken website. It doesn’t matter how good the advertising or product is, if the web design is cumbersome people will take their business elsewhere. Consumers have a very short attention span. For every extra second they spend waiting for a page to load, the likelihood of losing that sale increases.  

Bounce rate and conversions

Before you can go about fixing any potential issue with your page speed, you need to identify where the problems are on your site. It may be that your whole website is suffering from several issues that are causing longer load times. However, you may find that there are points in your customer’s journey that are preventing conversions. A great tool for understanding where you may be losing potential customers is Google Analytics. For more information read our online guide for tracking performance with Google Analytics. A key statistic to look at is something called ‘bounce rate’. ‘Bounce rate’ is the number of people who land on a page and then leave. It effectively shows you what percentage of customers leave your site at each step of the conversion journey. If you can see a page has a particularly high ‘bounce rate’ compared to other pages on your site, then it might be that this page is where you need to focus improvements.  

Why is my website slow?

If you have run a site speed test or found a significantly high bounce rate on a page, it is fair to be a bit overwhelmed when it comes to fixing the problem. There are numerous potential issues with your website that can cause slow website load times. As a website design agency, we offer services to troubleshoot and fix a variety of website issues. It could be anything from server load times to the size of images you have across your site that causes slow page load times. Ideally, you don’t want anything on your site taking longer than three seconds to load. Any more than this and you will find your conversions start to drop. Strong web design should not only create a site that is easy to navigate, but also one that maintains load speeds of less than three seconds.  

5 top tips for improving your site speed

  1. Server response time – A fast server response time will have a huge impact on your website load speeds. It’s important to choose the right server and hosting options. Make sure whatever you opt for can handle the level of traffic you are anticipating on your site. 
  2. Compression – When someone loads your website, they are effectively downloading all the information on each page they visit. You should compress all content and images to make this process as quick as possible.  
  3. Browser caching – Enabling browser caching means that a user’s cache will store elements of your website. This means when they revisit your site, the browser will load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server.  
  4. External hosting platforms – Compressing images is great but when it comes to videos it is worth using external hosting. Don’t upload video directly to your site as this will take the user a long time to load. It is a much better practice to use Facebook, YouTube or Vimeo and then embed these videos.  
  5. Track your site speed and mobile page speeds – As you make these changes you should see improvements to your site speed on mobile and desktop. Keep track of these improvements so you can see what works for you and what doesn’t.  

For more information about our web design services, get in touch with our digital marketing agency in Bournemouth. We can help your business generate more conversions by optimising your website. Speak to a member of our team by sending us an email at hello@upperdog.co.uk or calling 01202 798820. 

Pretty good, right?

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