Reduce the loading time of your website pages to retain users

As Google search evolves to mobile-optimized websites that top its search results, how can you improve your websites to keep your customers coming back?

In recent weeks, online shopping has boomed, especially in e-commerce categories like groceries and medicines. But what if your website has less than optimal page load times? Your customers will turn to more efficient sites on their devices.

The size of images on websites affects the weight of pages, which has a significant impact on the user experience and pushes visitors to leave the site for a more optimized site. Google notes that when the page load time drops from one second to five seconds, the probability of a bounce - users turn away from the page to visit other sites - increases by 90% .

According to a study by Unbounce, 26.9% of visitors to mobile sites will only wait between one and three seconds for a site to load before leaving. New York-based imaging solutions provider LiquidPixels compared the home pages of 17 retailers from a cross-section of product categories and industries to explore images that impact loading time and site performance. Depending on the weight of the image, the results vary from Target, which loaded the fastest, to Chow Tai Fook jewelers, which took the longest to load. Other retailers like Amazon, Tesco and Home Depot have less than optimal load times.

An analysis of the "Amazon Basics" page showed a staggering page weight of 29.3 MB. On a mobile connection at 17 Mb / s, the page download would take 13 seconds. With image optimization, the download time would be reduced by two seconds. Tesco PLC has a page weight of 15.8 MB. Looking at the page on a 17 Mbps mobile connection, the download would take almost seven seconds.

More than half of web traffic comes from mobile

If the site were optimized in terms of images, the page weight would be 12.4 MB, which would make it possible to download in five seconds. This represents a 28.6% increase in speed or a two-second time saving for charging. Chow Tai Fook, the private conglomerate of Hong Kong which holds interests in fine jewelry, real estate development, hotels and retail, has a huge weight of 48.6 MB which would take almost 23 seconds to load on a standard mobile connection. With optimized imagery, page load times would be improved by at least five seconds.

Google uses mobile-first indexing for more than half of its pages visible worldwide. Mobile-first indexing will be applied for the entire Web from September 2020 . This means that less than optimal page load times, with more "weight" added by large images, will be less attractive to the search engine.

More than half of overall web traffic comes from mobile -  yet pages take around 15 seconds to load on a mobile device . The greater the weight of the image, the less the site is optimized for mobile, which increases the chances that consumers will turn to other sites.