When browsing online, we are not a patient bunch, and we’ve all had times when waiting for a web page to load has got too much and we’ve clicked away. In fact, more than 50 per cent of visitors will leave a website if it doesn’t load within three seconds. A website’s performance impacts many things from bounce rate to conversion rate and, today, also your Google ranking.
For businesses, though, it’s often a trade-off. A beautifully-designed site which lures people in could, conversely, take longer to load, while a simple site might by faster but not be as engaging... There are ways to make complex pages load quicker – such as including some complicated code inline or investing more on the infrastructure and hosting. As with many things, it is a balance, in this case between infrastructure, expenditure and functionality.
As mentioned above, speed nowadays also affects your website’s SEO. When Google first created its ranking, SEO centred around the content and the authority/weight of this content. Now how fast a page loads for a customer is important too. If it’s slow, then your website will drop down the rankings.
There are some ways of improving the performance of your website. Firstly, you could reduce the page weight. Is there script within the page which you don’t need? Are there images which are unnecessary or simply too large and are slowing up your page? Consider making your images an appropriate quality and size for the consuming device. If your website is primarily being looked at on a mobile device, then you don’t need images which look super sharp on a cinema-sized screen.
Another solution – which is aimed at reducing your bounce rate – is to only load a page ‘above the fold’ content initially. This means that a visitor will see, hopefully immediately, the top of the page they’ve clicked on, while photos and content underneath this line (below the fold) will continue loading in the background. Images and any larger page items will continue to back-fill as a visitor scrolls down.
This means that a visitor is ‘tricked’ into thinking that a page has loaded and are not tempted into clicking away. Research and statistics show that if there’s something on the screen for a visitor to look at, then they are more likely to stay. If all they encounter is a half-loaded page, then they will leave.
Interestingly, ‘above the fold’ is not a new term but historically refers to newspapers on a newsstand. They would typically be folded in half, so editors would make sure that the big headlines were visible ‘above the fold’ to encourage somebody to purchase it.
Arguably then, not only is it essential that your web page loads quickly ‘above the fold’ but that the content a visitor sees is engaging and encourages them to linger and keep scrolling down. What is above or below the fold will differ depending on the device it is being viewed on, so do consider this.
Look at your style sheet for the website and limit the size of the data, including images, HTML and JavaScript, on the top part of the page. Also, make sure that the main content on the page loads first – the words and images which will immediately engage with a visitor. Other things can take a little longer, such as any third-party widgets and side bars.
If you need advice on making you website perform faster, then contact Lake Solutions today.