Your website is like your business card. It’s the first impression your customers get when they’re looking to see who you are and what your business can offer them. It’s also often the deciding factor for customers whether or not they will spend money on your products or services. With your website being so closely tied to your bottom line, it shouldn’t be an afterthought and its performance definitely shouldn’t be overlooked.

Slow websites are frustrating, and anyone who regularly browses the web can attest to this. People have become so accustomed to websites loading at a near-lightning speed, that anything which takes longer than three seconds to load isn’t worth waiting for. Research shows that 53% of mobile users will abandon that website rather than waiting. 

Furthermore, if a website is confusing in any aspect, users will leave the site. Once they get to a landing page, they need to be able to understand what the product or service is, what it does, and what it can do for them. If it isn’t clear right away, or if it isn’t clear where to find that information on your website, they will exit the page and search somewhere else. 

Your website performance isn’t just about how well your website works. It’s about how well you can retain users and gain customers. Pinterest learned this when they conducted an experiment in 2015. When they lessened the perceived wait time for users and improved the mobile web home landing page performance by 60%, they increased their sign-ups by 40%. 

The key takeaway is, if your website isn’t performing well enough, your users will find a different website that is and give that company their attention and potentially their money as well. A well-performing website can increase conversions, whether it’s sales, sign-ups, or subscriptions. It’s crucial to know how to improve your website’s performance so you can give your users a better experience. 

Optimize for mobile

More than half of search engine traffic comes from mobile users, and that number is only going up. Having a website that isn’t mobile-friendly is like leaving money on the table because you’re ignoring the user experience of potentially half of your customers. Make sure your website is responsive and easy to use on any mobile device, including smartphones and tablets. 

Increase loading times

Conducting web testing to see which areas of your website are bogged down by slow loading times can give you a good place to start when trying to improve your webpage loading speed. The goal is to have everything load in two seconds or less – ideally in the blink of an eye. 

You can achieve an increase in loading times by making sure all the images on your website are optimized for the web. All too often, stock photos or high-resolution photos are uploaded straight to the server without being run through an image optimizer first, which reduces the file size as much as possible without compromising quality. It can dramatically speed up page load times when all the assets are optimized, especially when it comes to image-heavy sites like e-commerce stores. Secondly, reducing the number of HTTP requests from the browser can help increase loading speeds, which can be done by combining multiple CSS or Javascript files into one large file so they all load as one unit rather than individually. Lastly, using browser cache to temporarily store assets locally rather than pulling them from the browser for each visit can help improve loading times. 

If you don't know how to manage that for your Shipping or Trading company website - please write us to [email protected], as our team does this stuff.