Do you know how long a potential customer or client will stay on your website? Research shows approximately two seconds! Yup, two whole seconds. If you don’t grab their attention or your website is super slow, they will move on.

With everything being at the touch of a client’s and customer’s fingers, website speed optimization is a critical component to your conversion optimization!

How can a leading Austin web development team pick up the speed on your website? We have a couple tricks up our sleeves.

Fix the loading time

The first thing to worry about is how long your website takes to load. If the “spinning wheel of death,” is front and center, forget about it. Clients and customers are  simply going to hit the backspace button and keep moving along.

A survey done states 79 percent of customers say they wouldn’t return to a website with poor performances like speed.

Besides annoyed customers and clients, Google also dislikes slow websites. Google has been doing some major overhaul on their current systems.

One that launched is the Google speed update. This means all slow loading website’s rankings will be affected. The slower the website, the lower the ranking in Google.

This loading time of your website is affected by several things and these are a couple of them.

Minimize HTTP requests

Whenever someone visits your website, the browser fetches files, pages and pictures from the web server. This simply means the more pages, images and information - the more the browser fetches.

This can be a main problem for your loading time. Any Austin web development team can easily fix these issues for you in a few  different ways:

- Combining CSS/ JS files: This allows for the browser to combine files into one massive file.

-Queries: If you only need certain pages, images or information to load for customers and clients, you can simply increase the speed of these pages.

- Less is better: The amount of images you have can affect your speed. The larger the image the longer the load time.

Let’s talk about those photos

Whether you need those photos or not for your website, it’s best to remember: less is more. This is something both graphic design and web developers need to work together on.

As a general rule: if your images are over 2,000 pixels, downsize them. If they’re closer to 5,000 pixels, then it’s best to compress them to get the pixel sizes smaller!

Which is better for your website? JPEG images, PNG or GIF? JPEG images tend to be the largest images possible and when compressed they get pixelated. A PNG is often better because of the size and a GIF is used more for animation purposes.

Browser caching

All of those new customers and clients have saved cache and cookies on your server. Your browser sends a request to the business's browser and their browser sends one back. The website’s HTML is the first thing to download.

As Google states, “The download may require multiple round trips between the client and server, which delays the processing and may block rendering of page content, and also incurs data costs for the visitors.” The longer it takes on your server, the slower the website will be.” 

Overall, these are the basic ways your website can be running slow and showing the “wheel of death.” Stop losing potential clients and customers with a slow website and call in the professional Austin web development team at OMG Austin!

As an Austin web developer team, we run a number of tests to increase your website’s speed. Follow this link to learn about 20 different ways we could increase your website's speed.