Increasing Site Speed.
First impressions are critical, and this could not be truer in the ecommerce industry. With a seemingly infinite choice of online retailers, it can be a challenging job to attract and keep a potential customer on your site. Studies show that the first ten seconds a viewer spends on a site will most critically effect their decision to remain on the site longer. Longer time spent on a site generally translates to more sales. There are a number of things one can do to make their site more inviting, one of the most effective being an increase in the site speed and decrease in the load time. Simply put if the bulk of the critical first 10 seconds a user spends on a site is watching the site load – the chances of them continuing to make a purchase are severely diminished. In fact studies have shown that upwards of 40% of users will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load.
Some simple and effective tips to increasing site speed:
1) Minification:
The more characters that exist in your source code the longer your page load times will be. This holds especially true for Java Script as well as CSS. Minifying your code (that is eliminating excess characters) will greatly increase the speed of your site. This process has become relatively easy due to the abundance of various minification tools available.
2) Image Creation, Optimization and Dimensions:
Images can take a considerable percentage of the load time of a site; however this can be optimized to load as efficiently as possible.
When creating an image for your site its important to understand how to differentiate between a GIF, JPEG and PNG image extension and when to use one vs. the other as particular formats are more suitable for certain types of images.
In the same way that code can be minified, images can be as well and the process is called optimization. There are several tools that can optimize an image – and in doing so will significantly decrease the size of an image while maintaining the quality of the Image using various compression techniques.
Setting the dimensions of your image via HTML can increase load times, instead reduce the actual size of the Image to decrease rendering time.
3) Make Use of Style Sheets and Java Script files:
Declaring and coding your CSS and Java Script in separate files and not inline is a good way to go to boost site speed. Having all of the CSS and Java Script in a separate file that only needs to be loaded once, decreases site speed as visitors move from page to page.
4) Place Java Script file requests at the bottom of the page:
Many browsers will stop rendering other parts of a page once they come across a java script request. They will not continue to load the rest of the content of the page in parallel, and focus all its resources to downloading the java script file(s). This issue can be deferred by placing the java script file requests at the bottom of the page, allowing the rest of the page to load first – preventing the end user from staring at a largely blank screen for an extended period of time.
5) Optimize your web server:
A simple and free way to reduce page speed is using Google’s free open source Page Speed Module. A tool which can be run and installed on virtually all versions of Apache and will automatically apply industry best standards to pages and associated assets.
Increasing Site Speed.
First impressions are critical, and this could not be truer in the ecommerce industry. With a seemingly infinite choice of online retailers, it can be a challenging job to attract and keep a potential customer on your site. Studies show that the first ten seconds a viewer spends on a site will most critically effect their decision to remain on the site longer. Longer time spent on a site generally translates to more sales. There are a number of things one can do to make their site more inviting, one of the most effective being an increase in the site speed and decrease in the load time. Simply put if the bulk of the critical first 10 seconds a user spends on a site is watching the site load – the chances of them continuing to make a purchase are severely diminished. In fact studies have shown that upwards of 40% of users will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load.
Some simple and effective tips to increasing site speed:
1) Minification:
The more characters that exist in your source code the longer your page load times will be. This holds especially true for Java Script as well as CSS. Minifying your code (that is eliminating excess characters) will greatly increase the speed of your site. This process has become relatively easy due to the abundance of various minification tools available.
2) Image Creation, Optimization and Dimensions:
Images can take a considerable percentage of the load time of a site; however this can be optimized to load as efficiently as possible. When creating an image for your site its important to understand how to differentiate between a GIF, JPEG and PNG image extension and when to use one vs. the other as particular formats are more suitable for certain types of images.
In the same way that code can be minified, images can be as well and the process is called optimization. There are several tools that can optimize an image – and in doing so will significantly decrease the size of an image while maintaining the quality of the Image using various compression techniques.
Setting the dimensions of your image via HTML can increase load times, instead reduce the actual size of the Image to decrease rendering time.
3) Make Use of Style Sheets and Java Script files:
Declaring and coding your CSS and Java Script in separate files and not inline is a good way to go to boost site speed. Having all of the CSS and Java Script in a separate file that only needs to be loaded once, decreases site speed as visitors move from page to page.
4) Place Java Script file requests at the bottom of the page:
Many browsers will stop rendering other parts of a page once they come across a java script request. They will not continue to load the rest of the content of the page in parallel, and focus all its resources to downloading the java script file(s). This issue can be deferred by placing the java script file requests at the bottom of the page, allowing the rest of the page to load first – preventing the end user from staring at a largely blank screen for an extended period of time.
5) Optimize your web server:
A simple and free way to reduce page speed is using Google’s free open source Page Speed Module. A tool which can be run and installed on virtually all versions of Apache and will automatically apply industry best standards to pages and associated assets.
For more information, give us a call! Or check out our website at www.sandiegomedia.com
