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How the Speed of Your Website Can Impact Your Sales

How the Speed of Your Website Can Impact Your Sales

It may not seem like website speed would be the deciding factor for an online purchase, but it impacts your sales more than you realize.

If technology has taught us anything as a society it’s that we can enjoy the convenience of instant answers and immediate results. That’s created the expectation for instant gratification.  

Therefore, if a website visitor doesn’t have their needs met in the first few seconds, then they will go elsewhere where they can. And, that most likely means they are going to your competitors.  

Understanding Website Visitor Behavior

Web pages don’t use any icons that show they are loading. So, if a visitor does not see anything happening within a few seconds of typing in the URL, then they assume there is a problem with the website. To them, it’s easier to press the back button and try a different site than wait any longer.  

That means the visitor has disengaged from your website at that point, losing a current sale. It also could result in them never returning, thereby impacting future sales. Now, if that visitor told others in their social circle about the experience, that could be even more lost sales. That’s because those prospects wouldn’t want to wait for your site to load either so will just avoid it altogether.  

Website Speed isn’t Just Important to People

Search engines like Google care, too. Google cites website speed as a critical factor that its search algorithm uses to rank websites. Therefore, a slow website could adversely impact your SEO rankings, which, in turn, impact traffic and essentially your sales volume.  

Google recommends that a website should load in under three seconds. This will help your ability to rank well in search engines. Plus, it will keep visitors on your website long enough to get to your next engagement tactic, which is valuable content.  

Addressing Website Speed

To increase website speed, there are many things you can do. To get started, it’s a good idea to do a speed audit with a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. From there, you have many options to help speed up your Joomla website.  

As an open-source platform, Joomla is always being improved in some way, including load time. Regularly update the version of Joomla you use along with the third-party extensions you may use. 

Next, go through the extensions that are part of your Joomla site and clean house. Which ones are must-have extensions and which are never used? Get rid of those “extra” extensions that aren’t being used as the extra baggage could be slowing your website speed. 

Another tip is to enable Joomla caching. This action gives you a way to deliver pre-generated content to the website visitor. If the content is changed, users will at least get the older version that is the cached version until the website can load the newest content.  

You can also enable Gzip compression, which shrinks the file size and, therefore, the server response time. Additionally, a content delivery network (CDN) can speed up your Joomla website. This tool is an interconnected cache server system that relies on geographical proximity to deliver web content. It works well when you are delivering text and graphics, media files, applications, and live streaming or on-demand streaming. 

Another area to address on your Joomla website involves images. While they are an integral part of your website, they also take up considerable bandwidth and slow load time. To solve this, you can use tools like TinyPNG or PunyPNG to reduce and optimize image size. 

Mobile optimization for your Joomla website is also important. This may be the time to also apply the same type of optimization tactics as noted above to ensure your mobile site loads quickly. 

Accelerate Your Website

Now is the time to speed up your Joomla website to boost conversions and sales. Just a few tools and regular housekeeping can keep your website ready to perform on-demand and meet your visitors’ expectations for instant gratification.

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