Increase Site Speed (and Revenue) in 10 Steps
Bonus Round
Want to get fancier? Here are a few more tips:
- Don't use sitewide SSL. Your checkout page uses SSL to encrypt customer information (that's all those pages with "https" instead of "http" in the address). That's a critical security feature. But you don't need to encrypt every page of your site; you only have to encrypt pages that accept user data. SSL encryption requires three times to five times the "round trips" between the server and browser, so only use it where you need it.
- Split server functions. Hopefully, your site already uses a separate server for database storage. You can get another major speed boost by setting up a separate server to handle processor-intensive tasks like running PHP or other scripting languages. We did this on our site, and took page load times from one second to .4 seconds. That dropped our site bounce rate by 5 percent.
- Reduce HTTP requests/request size. Reduce the round trips required to load your site by reducing the number of files needed for a page. You can do this by combining small images into "sprites" and combining JavaScript into a single file. You also want to serve static files from cookieless domains to minimize the size of each request (a CDN will do this for you).
Tools to Make it Easier
You can use two great tools to check your site performance, automatically compress and minify files, and give you a list of steps to speed up your site: Google PageSpeed and Yahoo's YSlow. Use them both; they'll give you detailed site speed improvement guidance in a minute or two.
Little Savings Equal Big Gains
In my experience, going from an eight-second load time to a four-second load time means a 10 percent improvement in conversion rate. From four seconds to two seconds provides a 5 percent improvement. And so on. To me, that's a cost reduction — you're losing fewer customers.
Plus, a faster site may translate to more social media shares, better search rankings, better ad performance and lower bandwidth costs.
You don't have to do every step in this article, but do what you can. The money you save may be your own.
Ian Lurie is the CEO of Portent, a full-service internet marketing company.