In this fast paced life, visitors want to surf websites on their finger tips. As per one of the surveys, websites having loading time of more than 3 seconds lead to reduced customer satisfaction by 16%.

According to some other surveys, loading time and ROI are both inter-related.

– More than 83% of people expect a web page to load in three seconds or less.

– More than 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.

– If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

– 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load.

– Conversion rate increases 74% when page load time improves from 8 to 2 seconds.

– More than 73% of consumers won’t return to a website if it doesn’t load properly on their mobile devices.

With loading time being so mission critical, it is imperative to provide best in class speed to visitors and not miss out on the ROI due to slow loading times.

Slower loading times also hampers the site’s SEO and brand image. More people tend to spread a negative word about your brand if the loading time is poor. You can use tools like Google Page Speed, Pingdom, Yslow and GT Metrix to derive your website’s speed.

Here are some of the ways of reducing your page’s load times:

Reduce the HTTP requests

According to Yahoo, 80% of a web page’s load time is spent downloading pieces of the entire page – images, videos, stylesheets, etc. That being said, simplifying your design and put less components on every page. Lesser the components, fewer the HTTP requests and faster the site. JS and CSS Optimiser is a great plugin to reduce the number of HTTP requests.

Use a content delivery network (CDN)

The user’s proximity to your web server has an impact on response times. Deploying your content across multiple, geographically dispersed servers will make your pages load faster from the user’s perspective. 75% of the retail sites as per one of the surveys do not use CDN.

Enable browser caching

Make sure that the cache-able resources like JS, CSS files, media files, etc. are set to be expire for a minimum 1 week to a maximum of 1 year according to RFC guidelines. With right enabling of browser caching, on subsequent visits at least the page load timing will be superfast. WordPress Plugins like W3 Total Cache is highly recommended although both WP Super Cache and Quick Cache can also improve caching and therefore reduce page loading times.

Know more about load time through our website page load time infographic. Here is the image version of our infographic.

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