Site Speed Still Matters?
The marketing stack dictates infrastructure before content. Content marketing is undeniably effective at getting sites to rank in search engines, which might satiate a client’s curiosity about what SEO can do for their visibility. And you might even be able to get slow sites to rank consistently, but the lack of attention to infrastructure will eventually come back to haunt you in conversion rates.
Site speed study
Pages that loaded in under one second converted at a rate around 2.5 times higher than pages that loaded slower than five seconds or more. But the gains weren’t limited to fast vs. slow pages. The difference in conversion rates between “fast” pages (two-second load times) and “really fast” pages (under one second) was also more than double. This brings me to my next point.
Users will demand even faster sites
We first ran this survey in 2014 and, compared to today, the difference between “really fast” sites and “fast” sites wasn’t as stark as it is now. When we run it again in five years, expect the difference to be even more dramatic. Why? 5G adoption. Another study run by Parks Associates last April shows that, while gigabit internet adoption has slowed in the US, worldwide broadband adoption is expected to reach one billion households worldwide by 2023.
When you factor in both those trends, the only thing throttling a mobile or desktop user’s experience will be poor web infrastructure.
Prioritizing site speed
If you’ve read this far, then you’ll agree the conversion rate benefits of a fast site are significant and the marketplace demand for fast user experiences is widening quickly. But what practical steps should you take toward a faster page speed and which of those steps should you prioritize? If you were to reorder those recommendations in terms of difficulty to implement for the average search marketer and impact on site speed, it would probably go something like this:
1. Optimize images and video
Marketers at any skill level can install a WordPress plugin like Smush and automatically reduce the size of any image uploaded in a piece of new or existing content. It saves a surprising amount of time when every image on a page is appropriately sized and compressed.
2. Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML
Minifying code is another quick win. There are plenty of tools out there that minify code, like minifycode.com. These tools essentially strip out all the spaces in the code, which can save a few kilobytes of size here and there. Those add up across an entire experience. It may take a developer to put these changes into place, but anybody can copy and paste code into the tools and send the minified version to the team doing the work.
3. Remove render-blocking JavaScript
Migrating to a tag management platform like Google Tag Manager can take the JavaScript weight off of your pages and put them in a container where they can load as fast or as slow as they need to without impairing the rest of the content or functionality on the page. Tag Managers are really easy to use for non-technical folks, too!
4. Medium difficulty, medium impact
The three recommendations below can be a little harder depending on who manages your CMS or existing web server. It could be as easy as clicking a checkbox, or as difficult as writing custom redirect rules on your setup. You’ll probably need to consult with either an IT and/or web developer to get these done.
5. Reduce redirects
Most SEOs can relay a URL redirect map to a client or internal stakeholder to determine server-side redirects with ease. But some sites include more complicated client-side redirect schemes using JavaScript. Working with a front end developer to tackle changes to script-based redirects can be tricky if those JS files impact the site functionality in other material ways.
6. Enable compression
Enabling compression in Apache or IIS is a pretty straightforward process, but requires access to servers and htaccess files that IT organizations are reluctant to hand marketers control over.
7. Leverage browser caching
Similarly, browser caching of website resources that don’t change very often is easy to do if you have control of the htaccess file. If you don’t, there are caching plugins or extensions for various CMS platforms that marketers can install to manage these settings.
8. High difficulty, high impact
Improve server response time Common ways to improve response times include finding a more reliable web hosting service, optimizing databases that deliver functionality to the site, and monitoring PHP usages. Again, all these things fall under IT purview and require additional decision-makers and costs to execute.
9. Use a content distribution network (CDN)
Adopting a CDN can be time-consuming, expensive (hundreds or thousands of dollars per month per domain depending on site traffic), and require expertise that the average marketer or consultant doesn’t have to enable. But if you can do it, studies suggest Google is measuring time to first byte as a ranking factor and the payoffs can be huge.
Courtesy & Copyright
https://creativesaints.com/
http://graphicwebdesign.in/
https://www.papeel.com.br/
https://justcreative.com/2020/11/09/best-ecommerce-growth-strategies/
https://justcreative.com/blog/page/4/
https://moz.com/blog?page=10
https://moz.com/blog/why-site-speed-still-matters