Increase Speed to Decrease Bounce Rate
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It’s well established that there’s a direct correlation between the loading time of your website and bounce rate (the number of people that leave your site prematurely) which is why it’s so important to ensure the fast loading of your website.
To better explain ‘bounce rate’ picture a busy high street where there are loads of people walking around… browsing for a particular solution. They’ll glance into shop windows and wander around a few different stores, but as the store owner, what you want is that person to spend a reasonable amount of time browsing in your store as this will greatly increase the probability they’ll spend money, and the more time they spend, typically, the higher the order value. This is why in the traditional retail space big brands invest so much in visual merchandising!
Now, picture a frustrated store owner that has plenty of customers walking in, but as soon as they walk through the front door, they turn around and leave. This means that while they have high traffic, they have very low engagement with their store, and therefore people simply don’t buy anything. When it comes to a website, it’s even easier to leave, as it’s merely a click of the mouse!
Having a high bounce rate will cripple your business success, and whilst a high bounce rate can be attributed to other factors such as a lack of engaging content, lack of relevance, lack of a clear user benefit, or confusing navigation… it has been found that 40% of potential customers will leave your website if the site takes more than three seconds to load.
Something to strongly consider is the trend in using specific landing pages that are separate to your main website; which allows you to drive a very relevant and high-quality audience to a specific marketing funnel.
You can use tools such as Unbounce landing page builder to quickly create effective landing pages that will be lightning fast and mobile friendly – the best thing about such applications is that you don’t need to worry about code; you can just drag and drop.
In this article, we’re going to look at four things you can do to improve the load speed of your website, and whilst this article is geared primarily toward WordPress users, the underlying principles are applicable to all platforms.
- HOSTING
Load speed can be contingent on your hosting provider. Hosting is something you seriously want to consider before committing to a provider; comparing the reviews of each hosting service before committing to one, particularly with regard to downtime (you want this to be extremely low) and download speed (the higher, the better) if the best bet. If you have a high volume of traffic to your site, you might want to consider upgrading from the standard ‘shared hosting’ to private hosting.
- DEACTIVATE AND DELETE UNUSED PLUGINS
There are many plugins on offer that can provide all sorts of advanced functionality to your site, but sometimes, websites are incredibly sluggish to load due to being clogged up with far too many plugins. There’s an element of a ‘child in a candy shop’ when it comes to selecting plugins, in that some business owners and even web designers feel the more, the better… but this can seriously impede load speed.
The first place to look are the reviews for the plugin itself, and then if your site is slow to load try using a page speed test with the trial and error method of deactivating each of your plugins to see how they affect the load time of your site. Additionally, if you are not actually using a plugin, then delete it, rather than keeping it on your WordPress installation.
- OPTIMIZE IMAGES
There are two aspects to focus on when it comes to how images impact the load time of your site; size and format. Many website owners use massive images and then scale them down using CSS, but the challenge with this is that browsers still have to load the full-size image. If you have multiple large images on a page, this can seriously affect load time.
The best option is to resize your images before you upload them to your site – using an image editor such as Photoshop. Something to consider, however, is that if your image is being viewed on a retina device, then you might want to upload an image scaled at 200% of what you wish it to appear on a web browser – in order to ensure the image is displayed crisply on retina screens.
- ENABLE BROWSER CACHING
When you regularly visit a website, the elements of the page that you frequently visit are actually stored on your hard drive, in a temporary storage folder, known as a cache – the benefit of this is that the browser can then load the page without having to send another request to the server. As a result of enabling browser caching, you are able to temporarily store data on the user’s computer, which means they will have a much faster experience.
