If you’ve come this far, it’s because your website is not working properly and you want to reduce the loading time. Or maybe part of the page loads, but the images take a long time to appear. Or there may be a part of the web structure that takes too long to appear. You’re in the right place.
You may be asking yourself, why is this happening, how can it be solved, what are the consequences of your business website working so slowly? Let’s try to solve these questions.
Did you know that if your page has a loading time between 1 s and 3 s your bounce rate increases by 32%?
You don’t want your website to load too slowly, as this can affect not only your site’s ranking, but also your conversions.
According to Amazon, for every 0.1 seconds longer a page takes to load, you lose 1% conversion. That means that if your website takes a long time to load you are probably losing not just 1%, but much higher figures. Up to 80-90% if most of your visitors can’t get in because of overbooking.
Another aspect that will be affected when a website takes a long time to load is the bounce rate. The bounce rate is a figure that measures the percentage of visitors who arrive at your website, but leave in less than a second. These are people who do not interact with your website. And they do not do it logically because they see the screen blank or the page half-loaded and they get tired of waiting.
So that we understand each other: it’s as if we went to a shop and nobody attended to us. What would we do? We would leave, wouldn’t we? I think so! Here it is the same, the user will not wait for the content of a web page and will go to another faster one.
The bounce rate is one of the data that influences the positioning of your website. If Google detects that your website has a very high bounce rate, it will lower your ranking, which in turn will cause you to get fewer visitors and will continue to hurt your ranking and your sales.
What does it depend on if a website loads well?
There are several reasons why a website may load slowly and the first thing to do is to identify what is causing it to take so long to load. The causes may be:
- Hosting is slow. Hard disk speed, resources, RAM, latency and many other aspects that could perhaps be solved by hiring a dedicated server or a more expensive hosting plan.
- The network on which your server is mounted is of poor quality. The data centre where the server is located is not very good. This is not up to you, but if that is the case, it would be fair to switch to another provider.
- Programming. This is one of the main reasons why your website may be slow. Images may not have the right dimensions and weight, there may be misplaced JavaScript that slows down the loading of the website or the database takes too long to load its results.
What can we do to improve the loading time of the website?
- Optimise the weight of the images.
- Choose a good hosting.
- Optimise cache management.
- Avoid loading with dependencies.
- Favour the embedding of video files.
