Bringing more viewers to your website is a task, but so is keeping them hooked! Read this blog to understand the difference page load speed can make to your jewellery business.
Imagine you’re at your favourite shopping store, treating yourself to some new clothes. You’ve picked your outfits, but the line at the counter is too long. Now, depending on how patient you are and how fantastic the outfits you’ve picked out are, you may or may not choose to wait in line to get your items checked out.
Online Shopping has made our lives a lot easier by saving us the hassle of waiting in long shopping queues, but it may have waiting lines of its own. Today, we talk about how page loading time impacts people’s decision to buy from your eCommerce site, and how to make your online store faster.
Do you have a website for your jewellery brand? Are you curious as to how effectively your website is driving traffic for your brand? Then read on because, in this blog, we talk about page speed and discuss all there is to know about it, and why it is crucial to the success of your eCommerce website
What is Page Speed?
Page speed is the amount of time it takes between the browser’s request for a page until the browser completes processing and rendering the content. Many factors affect the speed of a given page including quantity and type of content, the distance the data travels, connection type, device, operating system, and browser.
Why is Page Speed important?
Your jewellery store website invites people from all over the world to check out your inventory.
Your page speed influences user perceptions, and if your page loads slowly, you’ve lost them before your page finishes loading. A decrease in page speed of as little as 500 milliseconds is all it takes to adversely affect people’s perceptions of a site, the brand, and its products. Your page speed could undermine your goals and ultimately decrease revenue. A slow-loading website can hurt your Google rankings.
What is the difference between Page Speed & Site Speed?
Page speed is often confused with “site speed,” which is actually the page speed for a sample of page views on a site. Page speed can be described in either “page load time” (the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page) or “time to first byte” (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server).
How to decrease your page loading time
Google has indicated that site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. And research has shown that Google might be specifically measuring time to the first byte when it considers page speed. Take a look at how you can boost your page speed in N easy steps!
- Compress your files: Reduce the size of the CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files on your website that are larger than 150 bytes.
- Optimize Webpage Images: Be sure that your images are no larger than they need to be, that they are in the right file format (PNGs are generally better for graphics with fewer than 16 colours while JPEGs are generally better for photographs) and that they are compressed for the web.
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML: By optimizing your code (including removing spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters), you can dramatically increase your page speed. Also remove code comments, formatting, and unused code.
- Minimize Redirects: Each time a page redirects to another page, your visitor faces additional time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete. Each of those additional redirects makes your page load slower.
- Utilise Browser Caching: Browsers cache a lot of information (stylesheets, images, JavaScript files, and more) so that when a visitor comes back to your site, the browser doesn’t have to reload the entire page. Use a tool like YSlow to see if you already have an expiration date set for your cache. Then set your “expires” header for how long you want that information to be cached.
- Improve Server Response Time: Your server response time is affected by the amount of traffic you receive, the resources each page uses, the software your server uses, and the hosting solution you use. To improve your server response time, look for performance bottlenecks like slow database queries, slow routing, or a lack of adequate memory and fix them. The optimal server response time is under 200ms
Page speed isn’t just a technical element of your webpage experience, but is also important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Longer load times have also been shown to affect conversions negatively. In conclusion, optimizing page speed can greatly impact your jewellery store’s online as well as offline business as well as your impression on your existing and potential customers.
