Saturday, January 18, 2014

Improve Your Website and Conversion Rates with Website Speed Analysis



By optimizing the speed of your website you will enable visitors to easily access your website and be able to view what they want, get services that are offered on your website, or purchase goods from your website without problems in load time.

A faster website results in the improvement of a visitor’s experience and this leads to increased return visits and users adopting your website. A good example is the speed optimization done on the website Shopzilla. The speed of the website was optimized resulting in a reduction in page load time from seven seconds to two seconds and this led to a 7% to 12% increase in conversion rate. When the load time of the website was reduced by five seconds this resulted in a 25% increase in page views.


Google conducted an experiment in 2006 where the company increased the total number of search results on its website from 10 to 30. This led to an increase in page load time by 0.5 seconds that caused a 20% drop in traffic and revenue.

By optimizing the speed of your website you will enable your website to rank higher in search results done in the various search engines and this will lead to more people visiting your website. In 2010 Google included website speed in their search ranking algorithm, hence by optimizing the speed of your website you will increase its search ranking in searches done on Google.

Elements That Affect Website Speed and Methods to Improve Them

Images
Browsers only start to render a page after the images on that page have been loaded. By specifying the dimensions of the images on your website you will reduce the time taken by the process and therefore reduce the load time of your website. The size of the images also determines the load time of the website, therefore you should try to use smaller images and formats are smaller in size. Unnecessary colors and comments on the images should be avoided since they increase the image size.

Tables
Tables are used to control the page layout, since they enable you to put everything where they should be. However if they are used carelessly they will increase the load time of your website. You should avoid using nested tables since the browser takes a long time to render them. You should also break up the tables that are big into several smaller ones; this will enable the browser to display the small tables one by one, rather than waiting for a longer time for the big tables to load.

Multimedia Files
Multimedia files such as Java animations, flash, and background music may improve the general appearance of your website but they will also increase the load time of your website. This will repel visitors to your website. Some of the visitors to your website may also be using web browsers that lack the necessary plug-ins to view or listen to the multimedia files, this may make your website to be unusable by them. You should carefully consider the options that you have before adding multimedia files to your website.

Number of DNS Lookups
Reducing the number of domain names that are unique, from which the various resources are loaded will result in a reduction in the number of DNS resolutions that have to be made by the browser and hence result in a decrease in round trip delays.

Hosting: Content Delivery Networks
By using a content delivery network you will be able to deliver your website’s content effectively since they use a number of web servers that are distributed worldwide. Based on where a given visitor is located and the response time that is quickest it will select a server and deliver the content of the website as fast as it can.

Hosting: Browser Caching
Browser caching is one of the ways you can reduce the load time of your website. Instead of loading all elements from your server whenever a visitor accesses your website, it may load elements such as images from cache of the browser.

Hosting: Gzip Compression
By using gzip compression to compress your website’s CSS and HTML files you reduce the files by around 30 % to 50%. This will lead to visitor taking less time to access your website as a result of lesser load time and less bandwidth being used.

What You Should Consider When Improving Your Website’s Performance
When improving the performance of your website, you should balance the information in the website, its visual appearance, and function well with the website’s size in order to give visitors the best navigating experience.

Website Optimization offers market leading solutions in speed optimization that will greatly reduce the load time of your website and maximize its performance. The load time of your website will decrease tremendously after using our services and this will lead to a large increase in the number of visitors to your website.

Website Optimization
3134 SUNNYWOOD DR
ANN ARBOR, MI 48103
Phone: (877) 748-3678
Fax: (734) 661-1331
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/
https://plus.google.com/108123505155721216764/