By James Kwon
06/11/2015
By James Kwon
Let’s be real, any delay on a computer is frustrating. We’ve all arrived at a web page and realized that, to our dismay, there is a noticeable wait time to view content. It may only be a seven second delay—but that’s four seconds more than many other webpages that your site visitors view on a regular basis.
New users to your site take drastic action when your site is slow. A recent survey found that users tend to abandon a website altogether that doesn’t load in 3 seconds. A shocking 79% of web shoppers said they wouldn’t shop on a site again with a slow speed. Even more, 44% of these people said they would tell a friend about such a negative online experience.
Don’t worry: there are easy steps you can take today to improve the speed of your current website.
The first step to fixing a problem is recognizing you have one. Chances are that your load time is slow. To be sure, take a look using this free tool from Pingdom. Believe it or not, the expectation for load time has dropped down to a measely three to four seconds. Don’t believe it? Try out some of your favorite sites to compare load times.
TinyJPG is a tool that our agency discovered awhile back thanks to our bi-weekly innovation meetings known as Native Creatives. TinyJPG (in addition to having a cute panda as their logo) optimizes the content storage of an image. In other words, they compress the image as effectively as possible to make the file smaller without changing what the naked eye views on the web.
TinyJPG will decrease your image size by an average of 70% (insert gasp here)!
Upload as many images as you want on their website. If you want to get especially fancy, we recommend installing the WordPress plugin — a standard plugin on every website we build at Figmints.
In addition to a free load time tool, Pingdom also provides a suite of other handy analytics to understand more about how your site visitors experience your website.
Pingdom’s coolest tool lets you analyze your web users in real time. Yes, that’s right, you can view a site visitor’s exact activity on your website as they are on your site (okay, it’s a tad creepy, but go with it).
Most importantly, their basic offerings monitor how users interact with your website by observing real user flows. With this information, Pingdom will alert you if a certain flow through specific pages is slower than others. It lets you hone in on exactly which pages are causing the bigggest frustrations for your site visitors.
Having a video on your website can be a tremendous way to capture the full attention of each of your site visitors. As I’m sure you’ve heard, video is the most engaging form of content. You may have particularly noticed the ambient video trend on popular sites like Airbnb and Skype.
While including video on your site is great, you need to make sure that it’s not negatively impacting your load time. Video files are GIANT. It is crucial that you host your videos (and thus the large files that work together to create the video) offsite.
We recommend Vimeo as industry standard. You can also host videos on YouTube, but you’ll end up forcing your site visitors to watch the ads that show up at the beginning (which no one likes).
A slow website load time is a very real concern. First, identify your load time. Next, take steps to decrease the sizes of files on your website that are likely causing the slow load time.
Your website is the digital face of your company — don’t take its importance & performance lightly. Show the best version of your company as quickly as possible by optimizing load time!
Still have a few questions? Feel free to tweet @figmints for real time answers and advice.
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