Time is the most valuable asset. Nothing is more frustrating than slow page loading. A slow website kills conversions and impacts search rankings. Google stated that it is important to consider website speed when determining search rankings.
Here are some interesting website load statistics:
- An Akamai study[1] showed that 47% of customers expect websites to load in a few seconds or less.
- One second delay on Amazon could cost $1.6 billion on sales every year.
- According to Pingdom, 78% of the top[2] 100 retail websites take under three seconds to load.
- One second delay on your page load results in a seven percent reduction[3] in conversions.
- The average load time on the desktop is 1.286 and 2.594 seconds on mobile.
Optimizing your website’s speed is not a necessity, but a must-have, especially if you want to beat out the slower competition. Once you notice that your site is loading more than three seconds, it’s time to figure out things that can slow down your website speed and improve the overall performance.
Let’s discover lesser-known causes of website slowdown and find the best solutions to deal with each one.
1. Caching issues
Browser caching is very important for repeat visitors. Every time users come to your website for the first time, their browser stores all the files like images, CSS, and Java files for a specified period. The next time the visitors come back to the web page, browser caching allows these stored files to be served quickly upon the user’s next visit.
Reducing the number of round-trips results in faster page load times and improve user experience. Caching can definitely help you speed your website, but it’s not without its issues. If you don’t set up caching properly, it can hurt user interaction. It’s