We all know how a website should function, but not every site loads at the same speed. It’s those bumps in the digital road that can make or break a user’s experience and ultimately pull visitors away from your site.

Think about a time you’ve tried using your phone to find information on a bad website: how nothing loaded due to the pages being weighed down by too much data and how frustrating it was to be kept from getting what you needed.

Improving your website’s performance has a lot to do with improving the user’s experience, and Click Rain is here to share how you can help your business thrive in the digital market.

Page Load Speed & The Bottom Line

Studies have shown that 47% of people expect a site to load within two seconds or less--any longer and they close the page.

To put this into perspective, an ecommerce site with a one-second delay in a page response sees a 7% drop off in conversions. Over the course of a year, that site is losing millions of sales. More importantly, customers or visitors will stop returning to such sites leaving the site with little to no traffic.

For a business to be successful on the web, a fast website is a must. Powerful and reliable websites boost conversions by keeping customers engaged.

How to Test Site Speed

There are several ways to test your site’s speed: Google’s Page Speed Test and webpagetest.org are good places to start. They’ll show you the types of elements your site is using, like images, videos, fonts, and services, and whether any of them are slowing you down.

From there, making improvements could be as simple as resizing images that are too large, or more complicated, like changing your page’s development to load critical elements first and supplementary content in the background.

Of course, there are always factors you can’t control—like the data limits of your customers’ cell phone plans. By optimizing where you can, you improve your ability to meet people’s needs despite those limitations.

Blake codes a website in the Click Rain office.

Website Performance Checklist

But how do you know if your site is performing as well as it should, and what can you do to make it better?

1: Reduce the size of high-resolution images

Images with high resolution tend to have larger file sizes, and ultimately slow down load time. Compressing image files significantly helps websites with image-heavy content.

2: Use a content delivery network (CDN)

A CDN is a group of interconnected servers that provide internet content from a network physically closest to a user to speed up its delivery. If a business owner in India has a large following in the U.S. they might want to consider a CDN. This way their site can be hosted on a server closer to their audience and reduce load times.

3: Reduce Redirects

It may seem that redirects are unavoidable but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t manage them. Having too many can seriously affect mobile users' experience.

Click Rain & Web Performance

When optimizing your business’s website, don’t think you need to start from scratch. Click Rain has helped tons of businesses bring out the best in their websites.

Our system of creating websites that grab attention, swiftly deliver users from page to page, and move up the search rankings is something we have fine tuned since we began in the digital market way back in 2008.

Our Tried & True Strategies

Some of our strategies to improve online business sites include:

  • Taking a mobile-first approach to web design and development. By catering to the smallest viewpoints first we can build up to progressively larger views. As a result, we’ve found that sites look and perform great on any screen size.

  • Creating customized experiences for users by dynamically responding to their interactions with your site and serving them the most relevant content.

  • Designing and developing every site with user experience in mind so your customers will find what they’re looking for in the most seamless way possible.

Luke works on a design in the Click Rain office.

Let's Chat About Your Performance

If you still have questions or want our input we’d be happy to sit down and grab a coffee or something. Let’s talk about website performance and getting you up to speed. We promise it will be the least painful performance review you've ever had!

Connect With Us

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