Comments on: How Your Website Loses 7% of Potential Conversions

By: gwowders

gwowders — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:24:53 +0000

Hi Mark – Don’t ignore the dangers of a frontend SPOF tho (http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/03/28/frontend-spof-in-beijing/). Always load them async if you absolutely have to include them!

By: gwowders

gwowders — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:22:08 +0000

In reply to Nick Stamoulis. Hi Nick - If you think images are bad (optimised or not) you'd be amazed at how poorly placed CSS and JS can affect the users experience and page rendering times.

By: gwowders

gwowders — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:19:31 +0000

In reply to Bhrat Brij.

Hi Bhrat – You should find that many of the major CMS vendors support 1st or 3rd party plugins that will automatically implement many of the best practices to ensure the site loads as fast as it can. Of course, none of this matters if you’re hosting it on a ZX Spectrum as you point out 😉

By: Mark Garner

Mark Garner — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:43:24 +0000

Timely piece Bryan. I just did a similar post on why removing social media buttons altogether can boost conversions.
http://makethemclick.com.au/library/conversion-rates/speed-traps-remove-social-buttons

Sites like Smashing Magazine have done it and boast that their sharing actually went up because of it.

When I tried it on my own site, I saw an 70% drop in load time.

It’s hard to give up those social buttons though.

By: Bryan Eisenberg

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:05:31 +0000

In reply to Jan. Great question! It really depends on what you are planning to do with the data. Google's data is taken from real people experiencing your pages. Websiteoptimization speed services is measuring the size of all objects and calculating expected load time and a tool like firebug/yslow and pingdom are also looking at server calls, etc.

By: Jan

Jan — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:30:22 +0000

In reply to Bryan Eisenberg. Hi Bryan, one small question. Which data for site speed optimization we should use or to trust? For example, if you use pingdom tool, you get very different site load speed than when you use Google Analytics tool for measurement. Thanks, Jan.

By: alison_ruth1

alison_ruth1 — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 20:31:33 +0000

I’d be curious to see research on the difference in load time between CMS based sites and sites using their own/dedicated server… what do you think? The numbers are staggering, but obviously true! As a user, I’ve found myself frustrated plenty of times because of load speed. Thanks for sharing, Brian. I particularly like the infographics. I’m going to encourage our production team to do some of their own research and write a reaction post on http://www.searchinfluence.com/blog

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 13:20:09 +0000

Since page load time is a ranking factor it’s extremely important to pay attention to it. There are numerous tools that you can use to check the speed of your pages. Culprits for slow load time are usually graphics. Sometimes a lot of graphics aren’t needed, so remove any that don’t have a specific purpose.

By: Bryan Eisenberg

Bryan Eisenberg — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:46:40 +0000

In reply to Melvin Kress.

Melvin,

I agree and I have been harping on this issue for almost 10 years. Here are a few oldie but goodie articles:
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1692681/are-we-there-yet
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1692479/conversion-rate-basics
http://www.grokdotcom.com/2009/09/03/make-your-images-load-faster/

Thanks to Meir for helping to share the gospel.

Best wishes,
Bryan

By: Melvin Kress

Melvin Kress — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:45:52 +0000

I agree as well. I’ve attended the Internet Retailer Design this past year and heard the CEO from Medical Supply Depot speak in this regard. It was from the top 5 presentations I’ve heard at the conference. When I got back to my office, I sat down with the team and discussed things and was able to make some immediate improvements to our page load speeds which increased our sales pretty much immediately. We now continue to focus on page speed before any other “conversion optimization” testing. It’s MUCH cheaper – practically free. I am surprised the exports have only realized this now. This to us became conversion optimization 101. Thank you Medical Supply Depot!

http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/02/24/themedicalsupplydepotcom-streamlines-speed