Speed kills. Did you know that consumers expect a site to load in 3 seconds or less? Learn why & how how to audit and optimize your site's speed with this quick guide. Plus, our own mini case studies on the impact site speed has for conversions! Checkout the full blog at https://www.vendasta.com/blog/speed-kills-websites-speed-and-performance

1. Leveraging
Website Speed
to
Increase Sales

2. What is page speed?

3. Page speed is the amount of time it takes for the content on a website’s page to fully load. In a world
where people have come to expect instantaneous results, faster is better.
In fact, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a
site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds, according to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com.
So 3 seconds is the minimum speed the average visitor would tolerate. Is the typical website up to the
task? Pingdom used their own clients as the data source and found that for them, the answer was a
resounding NO.

4. The standards many have been using for page load time come from a study
conducted by Geoff Kenyon where he compares website speed against the rest
of the web:
if your site loads in 5 seconds, it is faster than approximately 25% of the web
if your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than approximately 50% of the
web
if your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than approximately 75% of the
web
if your site loads in 0.8 seconds, it is faster than approximately 94% of the
web
So how can you determine how your website stacks up?

5. How to Determine Your Page
Speed and Score
1
¯¯¯
Use Google Analytics Site
Speed reports
2
¯¯¯
Use Google’s PageSpeed
Insights Tool
3
¯¯¯
Check Pingdom’s website
speed test
4
¯¯¯
Use GTMetrix for a
comprehensive look at your
site’s speed optimization
status.

6. Here’s how to measure how your website stacks up against the current user expectations we discussed above:
1. Hop into your website’s Google Analytics Site Speed reports. This will give you an idea of how your site has performed
over various time periods, and the load speed of each of your pages.
2. Enter your site’s URL into Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool. This will give you a report card on your website’s speed
performance on mobile devices and desktop. The report comes with some recommended actions you can take to
improve your site’s speed.
3. Check Pingdom’s website speed test to find out the speed, rank and percent faster than the average of Pingdom’s tested
websites
4. GTMetrix will provide a comprehensive look at your site’s speed optimization status.
Note: Don't puzzle yourself when you see different speed timing in Pingdom and Gtmetrix. As Pingdom will show you load time
(The time it takes to show the first result of your website - that's what google counts and you should too) and GTmetrix will show
you full load time (The time it takes to show full page with it's full functionality running). For further understanding, it's always
good to see the speed waterfall from both tools.
As part of your site speed audit (I’ll go over in more detail below), you’ll use these tools to track your optimization progress

7. Why does speed
matter?

8. Speed Hurts User Experience
User experience is probably the most
important reason you should care
about website speed, so we’ll start
here.
People don’t have the patience for slow
loading websites anymore. In the
beginning, just connecting to the
internet required a tolerance that just
doesn’t exist anymore.

9. Today, people are constantly online and you’ve got 3 seconds maximum to display your page or they’re gone. More
than 3 seconds creates a poor user experience and the bar is only going to get higher in the future.
In his talk on the “10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps”, entrepreneur and blogger Fred Wilson notes that,
“Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it. I see this more with
mainstream users than I do with power users. I think that power users sometimes have a bit of sympathetic eye to
the challenges of building really fast web apps, and maybe they’re willing to live with it, but when I look at my wife
and kids, they’re my mainstream view of the world. If something is slow, they’re just gone.”
The easiest way to think about this is how you navigate websites and what your expectations are for most sites. Do you
sit there and tolerate slow load times? What is your impression of a website that takes forever to load?

10. Speed Affects SEO

11. User experience is actually the driving force behind the SEO implications of site speed.
Edwin Toonen of Yoast explains ,
“Google’s latest research shows that the chance of a bounce increases 32% when the page load time goes from 1s
to 3s. 1s to 5s increases the chance to 90% and if your site takes up to 10s to load, the chance of a bounce increases
to 123%. That’s incredible. For search engines, better results and performance is a sign of a healthy site that pleases
customers and therefore should be rewarded with a higher ranking.”
While Google has been slow to officially reveal whether slow websites would receive ranking demotions, it appears
that those days are coming. You need to make sure your website and the websites you manage are ready.

12. Speed Kills Conversions
Source: SOASTA

13. Your site speed’s effect on conversions is what should really catch your attention. How can you move people through
your funnel if each step takes forever? Your super-fans will do it, but those new, hesitant people who are prone to
buyers-remorse will bounce.
For example, SOASTA recently did a study on one of their mPulse customers, a leading online retailer that enjoys a
significant (4.5M sessions) amount of mobile traffic.
Here were their key findings:
1. In terms of conversions, the performance sweet spot was 2.4 seconds
2. Pages that were just one second faster experienced a 27% conversion rate increase
3. At 4.2 seconds, the average conversion rate dropped below 1%
4. By the 6-second mark, the mobile conversion rate begins to plateau
The implications are pretty clear. Slow page load times hurt conversion rate. So Sherlock-esque deductive reasoning
would indicate that focusing on increasing site speed should increase conversion rate!

14. Make your Website
Load Faster

15. Leverage
Browser
Caching

16. When you visit sites, your browser often caches pages on the site to speed up load time.
Browser caching stores webpage resource files on a local computer when a user visits a webpage, so leveraging
browser caching is when you instruct browsers how their resources should be dealt with.
Things can slow down when the response from your server does not include caching headers or if resources are
specified to be cached for only a short time.
Leveraging caching will load your pages much faster for repeat visitors and so will other pages that share those same
resources.
Note: SEO Content Strategist Maddy Osman notes that “W3 Total Cache is great for this but is banned from certain
hosts (like GoDaddy). It needs an expert hand to configure so you don't break your website.”

17. Optimize
Images

18. If images load faster, your site loads faster, period. Google notes that “...images often account for most of
the downloaded bytes on a page. As a result, optimizing images can often yield some of the largest byte
savings and performance improvements.”
This means that you can get some big improvements when the images on your pages can be optimized to
reduce their file size without significantly impacting their visual quality.

19. Minify HTML,
CSS &
JavaScript

20. Minifying removes any unnecessary characters that are not required for the code to execute.
Sources of redundant data that you can remove includes code comments and formatting, removing
unused code, using shorter variable and function names, and more.

21. Enable gzip
compression

22. Gzip compression drastically reduces the size of files sent from your server when someone visits your
website. This will speed things up considerably.
According to GTMetrix,
“The reason gzip works so well in a web environment is because CSS files and HTML files use a lot of repeated text and
have loads of whitespace. Since gzip compresses common strings, this can reduce the size of pages and style sheets by
up to 70%!”

23. Reduce server
response time

24. Server response time is the amount of time it takes for a web server to respond to a request from a
browser. This is a key issue to address, because if your server response time is slow your pages will
display slow, no matter how optimized your pages are for speed.
Google says you should reduce your server response time under 200ms. So how do you make this
happen?

25. Avoid landing
page redirects

26. Your site can really slow down when you have more than one redirect from the given URL to the final
landing page. This sets off a redirect loop that takes time to process.
Here are a few examples of redirects that can slow things down:
example.com → m.example.com/home - multi-roundtrip penalty for mobile users.
example.com → www.example.com → m.example.com - very slow mobile experience

27. Prioritize
visible
content

28. This is the exact message you’ll get from Google’s PageSpeed tool when additional network round trips
are required to render the above the fold content of the page.
This “above the fold” content is what you see on a desktop or device when you visit a page. So prioritizing
visible content is the recommendation that you prioritize things so that essential elements on your page
load first (and quickly) for users and that you defer secondary page elements like social sharing plugins,
analytics javascript, etc.

29. Eliminate
render-
blocking
JavaScript and
CSS in above-
the-fold
content

30. JavaScript and CSS resources often prevent your page from displaying until they’re fully loaded. This is
often a good idea, since the premature display of your above the fold content can look pretty grotesque.
However, this is a common message you’ll get from Google about site speed, and addressing it can really
take your page speed up a few notches.

31. You don’t need to score 100/100
to experience growth on your
website.
If you’re at 40/100, make a
couple improvements as time
allows and shoot for 60/100.
Don’t burn yourself out shooting
for 100/100 immediately!
Speeding Up Vendasta’s Blog

32. So I’m writing this post about site speed, even as Vendasta sits at 44/100 for mobile speed and 60/100 for desktop
speed.
Trust me, I’m aware that there may be a question about street cred here. However, there’s more to our story than
Google’s insights tool will tell you.
At Vendasta, we’ve put in a lot of work on our site speed, but we’re clearly still not where we want to be. We’ve actually
made a lot of improvements, but we have a large site with a ton of content, so we’re not yet at our goal of 80/100 for
both mobile and desktop.
However, we’re not the only ones struggling with site speed! Lots of high-profile websites share the same challenges as
us.
Run some of your favorite sites through the tool and you’ll see what I mean!

33. As I mentioned above, every improvement we make to speed things up can have exponential results.
Vendasta Marketing Technologist Adam Bissonnette notes,
"The big change for us was server side stuff - we're in a unique position running our wordpress website in AppEngine
(nobody does this) and the big performance boosts were switching from AppEngine Standard to AppEngine Flex which
was in Beta. We also changed our php version from 5 to 7 which also helped at lot. Updating php brought its own set of
problems where certain plugins no longer worked and we had to deal with that fallout for a month or two but the speed
was more valuable than the lost functionality."
What you can take away from this is that finding the best solution for your specific situation is key. You
may find that tactics that move the needle for your site that we haven't even mentioned here!

34. Take a look at the growth of our blog following the initiation of our site speed efforts in May of 2016:
These improvements set the stage for all Vendasta content initiatives that followed. Since that time, we’ve
focused on producing a high volume of in-depth, quality content. Without our coinciding site speed
improvements it’s unlikely that you’d see the spike in traffic the analytics screenshot displays.
Performance will only improve as we continue to optimize our site speed and improve our user
experience!

35. It’s important to remember that
speed and user experience go
hand in hand.
Combined, the two can lead to
improvements in the one metric
that rules them all: Conversions!
iHeartRaves

36. iHeartRaves is a world leader in festival fashion whose mission is to inspire individual creativity and empower self
expression. Combined their two other sister brands, their Shopify stores are grossing $20M annually.
As an eCommerce site iHeartRaves is distinctly aware of the financial ramifications of poor website speed and
performance.
Brandon Chopp, Digital Marketing Strategist knew he had to improve site speed to help the business achieve their
revenue growth goals. He tackled iHeartRaves’ speed enhancements using the following tactics:
1. Optimize Images: In order to ensure our mobile site loads quickly, we use a Shopify app called Crush.pics.
This ensures that all our images are optimized for site speed while still retaining image quality.
2. Minify Code: We also took steps to minify all of our liquid code and prioritized script load order while
trimming down the total number of scripts being called.
3. Clean Up On-Page Assets: Removing unnecessary assets on some pages while reducing images assets on
others helped reduce site load time as well. We try to balance between speed and content, because we're an
ecommerce site. It's very important to us to make sure our image quality is up to our standards while
maintaining a great user experience for our customers.

37. The page load speed and bounce rate results really improved with these updates: “Since making changes
our site speed has decreased from 10.25 to 6.86 seconds year over year (a 65% decrease), and our
bounce rate decreased by 6%,” Brandon explains. “It was originally at 40.34% and is now down to 34%.”
These improvements have also translated into tangible financial results for iHeartRaves. “We’ve benefited
in Google from having a fast mobile site because our conversion rate has increased year over year thanks
in a large part to our site speed decreasing. By putting the customer’s' user experience first we've been
able to retain our customers and make it an easier shopping experience all around.”

38. Smaller websites can see marked
improvements in speed with just
a few key changes.
Try working through Jubaer's list
to start things off and see what
results you get before
proceeding to the next tactics.
Jubaer’s 6 Seconds and 40 Point
Improvement

39. Vendasta’s own SEO specialist, Jubaer Prodhan, shared an instance in which he followed Google’s Pagespeed Insight
Tool for his own site with some nice results.
Jubaer notes, “In my case, I have a wordpress website with loading time more than 8 seconds and GPI (Google
PageSpeed Insight) score of 43. I did the following things to improve the site speed.”:
1. Image Optimization: If done correctly, then it can reduce the page size and speed drastically. In my case, the
page size went down from 3MB to 1.6mb. Plugin used: ShortPixel Image Optimizer (You can also optimize
images with this tool)
2. Code Minification: Often time we use multiple wordpress plugins for our various needs. What we don’t
realize that most of them add extra CSS/HTML/Javascript to your site. Which increases the loading time and
browser request. Minifying (removing extra lines and codes) is an easy solution to this. Plugin used:
Autoptimize
3. Browser Cache: Using browser cache is recommended by most of the major tools. And it reduces bandwidth,
load time for return visitor, and many other useful things. Plugin used: WP Fastest Cache
Jubaer’s site now loads in 1.9 seconds and the GPI score is 83! That’s quite an improvement from 8 seconds and a GPI
score of 43.

40. To learn how to audit and optimize
your site, check out our full blog!

41. Getting real-world site speed improvements is always more messy than it appears in blog posts. You’re
going to face some challenges along the way, but stay focused on the results, because they’re going to
improve user experience, SEO and conversions in the long run.
That’s what is most important; prepping for the speedy future of online browsing.
If you need assistance, call on your techie friends or let us know how we can help!
If you have any experiences or advice to share, please feel free to chime in on this post’s comment
section as well...
Final Thoughts