Dear STM forum members,
My real name is Jeff from Blue Wing I met lots of you guys at the AWA Conference. I have never been on a forum like this before but everyone at the conference was so great I thought I would join!
A speaker at the conference said the load time of your landing page makes a huge difference in your conversion rate.
Ok, I got that and it makes sense. Now, I look at my client's landing page and it seems to me to load 'kinda slow' to use the technical term.
Therefore, I'd love to know:
1) How does one know if their page indeed loads slowly or is up to par?
2) If a page is not loading fast enough, what are the best tools, techniques, and services to get it up to snuff?
Thanks in advance for your input. Look forward to hearing from you on the forum and seeing you all at the next conference.
Sincerely,
Jeff (aka Freebird ;-)
Hello and welcome!
Page loading time optimisation is a biiiiig topic, but here are a few starting points.
You can get a good idea of what's slowing a client's page down by using fpt.pingdom.com. That'll test the load speed from a few different locations - choose the one closest to your clients' major base of customers - and will give you a "waterfall chart" explaining what's making the page load slowly.
As a general rule, a page that's loading in over 3 seconds is loading far too slowly, and making it load faster will almost certainly make your clients significantly more money. Ideally all pages should load in less than a second. There is no such thing as "too fast" - even reducing loading times from 200ms to 100ms can make a difference.
Now, as to what can make a page load slowly: there are dozens of things. But here are a few top problems to look out for.
1) Underpowered server. Very unlikely if they're serving static HTML pages, but if they're using something like Wordpress, it can definitely be an issue. Look for long waits before anything on the page loads, and also look for page loads that go up a lot at peak times. Solutions: implement a good caching plugin if they don't have one. Use Cloudflare. Buy a bigger server.
2) Unoptimised images. Check the size of all images. If they're over about 50k, 100k at a push, they're too large. Use something like Kraken.io for a quick fix. (It's not the best solution but it's the easiest.)
3) Javascript loading before the end of the page. Lots of people stick loads of Javascript files in the header of the HTML. Don't do that - it forces them all to load before the page renders. All Javascript that doesn't absolutely HAVE to be in the head tag should be loaded just before </body> at the foot of the page.
There are plenty more things that can bite you, but those are probably the three most common issues. Check for those and you'll definitely improve your chances!
Hope that helps!
Run your page through this:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
and this
http://www.webpagetest.org/
PageSpeed insights provide todos on what you can do to speed up your page.
Search this forum i wrote a guide on what to do step by step. Am on mobile else is link you.
Thanks for your message IAmAtilla, I searched before putting this post but did not find anything. Total n00b over here!!! Anyways thanks again and I will look for it.
Here's the post that Attila's referring to - it's a good one.
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...se-Your-Profit