Blog
How your website makes sales and conversion explode ... for your competition!
I'm sure you know some websites where you wonder if they're sending the bits by hand. But how is your website doing? Or your web shop? And uh ... how fast is for a user that is browsing it over 4G? Or a user that does not have super fast fiber yet or uses a fairly out of data personal computer?
Customers don't wait
Surely you know, customers have no patience. The time they went for a coffee when making an Internet connection only to return when the modem stopped blasting their eardrums is long gone. And yet I'm often amazed by the number of super slow websites I come across. If your website osr web shop 'displays' in 2 seconds, in other words is visible and usable for the user, you convert about 7.5% of the visitors. At five seconds that's don to 2% and at 10 seconds it plunges to 0.2%. The rest is already visiting your competition.
Interestingly enough your website or shop should not be faster than 0.1 second either. If a page is faster than 0.1 second the visitor has the impression the website didn't do anything at all.
Your server alone doesn't tell you what the customer is experiencing. I'll explain that further on in this blog.
You're dropping like a stone on Google
Not just customer, but also Google and other search engines look at your speed to determine your ranking. Slower websites rank lower. If visitors than navigate away from your site quickly because they think it's too slow, so called 'pogo sticking' all your expensive SEO- and especially search word optimizations won't help you keep your ranking up.
A page that freezes for 7 seconds
I'll give you an example. A webs hop that sells vacations froze the page for 7 seconds. Just count with me, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. That's a long wait! Most customers won't wait for that, so conversion was dramatically low. It wasn't the web server, that was lightning fast. So what was wrong? The vacation packages showed an interactive map of the area a vacation takes place. That was served by a third party provider, not their own web server. That map was taking the 7 seconds. But because it was below the well know fold, visitors had no idea what they were waiting for and quickly found another vacation somewhere else.
32 Second wait for an on-boarding page
Another example. An on-boarding website for a financial product wasn't fast asking the legally required questions, but the page with the final offer took 32 seconds to display for a potential customer. It goes without saying that the sales of the financial product were not doing well. This case also showed no problem in the web server. The offer page turned out to be loading 140(!) JavaScript libraries. That had to be fetched, read and processed (parsed in technical terms). And called on afterwards, which also consumed time. The page displayed 2 graphs, each rendered with a different JavaScript library. Successive developers had all added their own favorite flavor of JavaScript library turning this page into an oil tanker instead of the speedboat it should have been.
Cloudflare only slowed things down
A website used Cloudflare as a Content Delivery Netwerk (CDN). For this website Cloudflare was misconfigured. All content was set to dynamic so Cloudflare fetched everything, including static content from the web server each time. This slowed down static content. Because the web server received many more requests it was completely overloaded, slowing down the dynamic content.
By fixint the Cloudflare configuration page loading time went down from 6 to 2 seconds. Bingo! Because the conversion rate increased from 1.2% to 7.5%! A conversion percentage that's 5 times as high. And once Google catche on the number of visitors will increase as well.
In case you don't know what a CDN is you use that to deliver content that doesn't change, like images or JavaScript, efficiently to your visitors. The CDN reads those once, remembers them (caching in technical terms) and the second and further times it serves them from it's memory. This lowers the load on your web server and it speeds up delivery of the content to your vistor because the CDN has very fast servers and a very fast Internet connection.
What really causes a website or web shop to be fast or slow?
For those of you who want to understand what's happening under the hood, I'm listing some causes that can slow down your website. For anyone that prefers to delegate this, please continue to the last paragraph.
The web server: The web server delivers the content for the visitor. If the web server is not fast the visitor will have a bad experience. Particularly with web hosting packages we see long respons times. That's also true for so called 'unlimited' packages. You need to check what the unlimited claim applies to, there's always some limit that will hinder your visitors. But your own web server cal also become a bottleneck quickly, especially if the number of visitors grows.
The database: With a web shop the supporting database, where you store your products and sales, is often not capable of handling a big crowd. With a website this is usually not a problem.
Your internet connection: Often you're only offered a certain bandwidth, or a certain amount of Gigabytes per month. What providers don't talk about is the so called latency. Bandwidth is the width of the road, latency is its length. On a road that's wide but long, arriving at your destination will still take long. Even if you don't run your server in a shared environment this is an important factor.
The visitors Internet connection: You can be truly fast, but if your visitor has a slow connection or high latency, their experience will be bad if your website or shop can't handle that.
The number of components: Web pages are built from components. The web page itself, images, JavaScript, style sheets, fonts, ... Your visitors browser only fetches a limited number of those at the same time. If you have to many they all end up in a queue that your visitor has to wait for. The norm is a maximum of 20 components per page. We sometimes see 200 or more, that seriously slows down your page.
The size van de components: Images are the most common large components. We see it happen too often that an image is sent at full camera resolution to a phone. Of course the phone can scale it down, but bit takes time to send the large image and then shrink it to fit the screen. But big chunks of JavaScript where only a minimal portion is actually used and even large fonts can slow things down.
Third party components: Think of visitor tracking like Google Analytics, Facebook and LinkedIn. But also Google Maps if you show a map to your physical location. All this functionality is great but it all takes time. Recently we saw a website where a Pinterest tracking GIF took 6 seconds to be delivered. And sometimes you have double functionality you really don't need.
Executing JavaScript: We see the most beautiful functionality being created with JavaScript. But sometimes that functionality takes up a lot of time. Just think of the interactive map I mentioned in the example above. JavaScript is very flexible, but not exactly the fastest language.
Lack of caching: If a broser gets a component, like an image, from a server it can be stored in the browser so it doesn't have to fetched from the server again if it's needed again. This is called caching. But caching only happens if the server indicates that caching is beneficial. And that's where it often goes wrong: servers use the wrong settings causing browsers to fetch the same component 2,5 or more times. Needlessly.
How do you measure it?
To really know what different visitors will experience you need to simulate the circumstances of their visit as accurately as possible. First measure how your visitors come in, you can get that from your server logging.
Then you simulate the circumstance of your visitors as well as you can. Depending on your objectives, the complexity of your website or web shop and your budget you can do this yourself of hire a specialized company, like Sciante. The cost of making this measurable are reasonable, especially if you consider the hidden cost of a slow website.
And how can you make the website fast?
Your exact measures depend on your measurement results, but some improvements always help:
Make components as small as possible: For images this means the server has different sizes for different size devices. A visitor on a phone will receive a much smaller image than a visitor on a 70 inch television. For JavaScript and style sheets this means the so called minimizing, a form of code compression. For fonts it means using vector fonts instead of bitmap fonts.
Reduce the number of components : JavaScripts and style sheets that are used on the same page can be combined so the only have 1 component per type. If you use many small images, combine them in a font.
Use server compression: Many components can be compressed on the server side, allowing them to be transferred faster.. But use it selectively, images are often already compressed, compressing them again only takes extra time.
Use third party content sparingly: It sounds good to be able to see exactly what your users do. But ask yourself if you're really going to use it and check if you don't implement duplicate functionality. Placing a Pinterest tracking GIF is useless if you're not going to advertise on Pinterest.
Use a CDN for your statix content: A CDN can deliver static content faster and cheaper than expanding your own web server can in most cases. But test it before you sign a long term contract, there's a lot of bad apples in the bunch. Some components that you use, like JQuery, can be procured from an existing CDN.
So, what now?
Are you worried about your website's speed? Have a 15 minute chat with me. It doesn't cost any money, just a little time. And I promise you it will be a good investment. Then you'll know where you are and I'll explain what measures you need to take. Only then you'll know if your website will make your sales explode or your competitors.