How Fast Should your Website Load Up?
It used to be a seven-second rule that your website should load up and grab the attention of the website visitor or else they will hit the back button and visit the next one in the list.
But that is no longer the case.
Now with faster internet connections and the lowering of the attention span because of the “I have to have it now” mentality these days the loading time got even shorter.
According to an article on Hubspot, there was a study done by Portant that for the best conversion rates the website should load up between 1 to 4 seconds and the highest conversion rates are from websites that load up within the first 2 seconds. Conversation rates dropped 4.42% for every additional second it took to load up the website.
Optimizing Images
For eCommerce shops, it is important to have high-resolution clean images but you do not want the file size of these images to be too large and slow down your website loading time. Here are some examples of how to do this.
- Switch from using high file size images like .png and use other formats like .jpg instead. You can create each version of the same image and pick the smallest file for your website.
- Reduce the size of the image from something too large like 2000 x 1500 pixels and resize it to something reasonable like 800 x 600.
- Reduce the quality of the image using software to find the fine line between looking good yet small enough to use. Product images should be of higher quality but graphics on your website can be of lower quality.
- Enable lazy-loading images. A complete guide on this can be found here. WordPress has the option to enable lazy-loading images through the plugin Jetpack. Although if you want a faster website it would be best to avoid using CMS websites altogether and write the code from scratch.
- Make smaller versions of your full-sized images to use as thumbnails. This will reduce the loading time of your website.
Here are some tools to optimize your images online if you don’t have the software.
Here are some tools to convert your images online if you don’t have the software.
Optimize Videos
You can reduce the size of your videos as well to lower your website load time. You may get a video in DVD format that you have to convert to a file format to use on your website. After converting the video to a file format for your website it can become quite large.
On my PC I have the software I use to convert and optimize my videos. On my Macbook Pro, I use Quicktime to do the job.
Here are some online tools to optimize your videos.
Here are some online resources to convert your videos online.