If you thought that your website speed didn’t matter, you were wrong. Just one second of delays in time yields a plethora of not-so-desirable results, such as 11% fewer page views, a 7% loss in conversions, and a huge 16% decrease in levels of customer satisfaction. Big name companies such as Amazon and Walmart have already found this to be true, and have also reported that on the other hand, small amounts of improvement to site speed actually led to more conversions. Walmart reported a 2% increase in conversions per every one second of improvement, whilst Amazon noted 1% increased revenue for every 100 milliseconds of improvement to site speed.

High Expectations

When it comes to your website loading time, expectations are certainly high. A recent study revealed that almost half of web users will expect a web page to fully load in two seconds or less, with around 40% of users reporting that they will simply leave a web page which takes over three seconds to load. For those who sell products online, it’s important to note that over half of online shoppers list site loading time as a deciding factor when it comes to being loyal to a particular site. Along with focusing on the site itself, you can also improve loading time by improving your web server performance, often by adding more server memory from offtek.co.uk.

Reducing Server Response Time

Most cases of slow-loading sites have something to do with the server response time. Your target is a server response time of less than two hundred milliseconds, which can be achieved through the use of a web application monitoring system and checking for any bottlenecks in server performance. You can improve server response time in a range of different ways, including using a dedicated drive for the pagefile, keeping your hard disks defragmented, avoiding running 16-bit applications, keeping an eye out for memory leaks and removing any seldom-used utilities. The majority of servers will come with a range of logging or monitoring utilities which you may not need to use on a regular basis. If there is anything downloaded onto your web server which is seldom used, removing it can free up memory and improve response time.

Use Less Resources

The more resources per page view, the bigger the request for your web server – and subsequently, the slower the response. The less resources that you use, the faster your web server will be able to work when it comes to loading your page for web users, leading to better traffic to your site, higher conversion rates, and more satisfied visitors and customers overall. Webmasters who use page resources wisely can improve their server capacity by enormous amounts, allowing the server to be able to serve more visitors per second and respond quicker due to a reduced workload.

Having a fast-loading website is obviously important to web users today! Optimising your web server by adding memory, removing unused items and using less resources can have a direct positive effect on your website’s loading time.