Optimizing Website Speed can Increase Consumer Traffic

So  you’ve worked hard to cast your hooks into the social web and you’ve optimized your site for search engines.  The result should be a growth in website traffic, which is your long-term goal.  And rightly so, for in the online marketplace, website traffic is virtual currency and you should attempt to build and maintain as high a level as is sustainable.  But, have you stopped to consider the role user connection speed plays in your efforts to build traffic?

Speed is, it turns out, a key factor in retaining incoming traffic.  The internet has made consumers impatient and the longer they have to wait to see your content, the less likely they’ll stick around to view it.  An analysis conducted by Google VP Marissa Mayer brings this point to fruition:

Marissa ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results [from ten] to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%.

Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it?

After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.

To underscore the point, an increase in the site’s load time of half a second resulted in a 20% decrease in the site’s traffic.  So with the importance of speed now on our minds, please allow me to suggest a few actions you can take to minimize what we might refer to as “impatient traffic loss,” which includes benchmarking your site and optimizing your webserver and online media.

Load Time Optimization

The speed of your site, or the rate it loads in the consumer’s browser, can be optimized.  You can control two aspects of load time: 1) the speed of the web server that hosts your content and 2) the size of the files you present to the consumer.  Let’s tackle each independently.

1. Server optimization

A webserver hosts your content, so the speed of your content’s load time is intricately intertwined to the server speed.   Unfortunately, all webservers are not created equal.  Before worrying about server optimization, it’s worth benchmarking your server’s speed.  This can be done through myriad of free, online speed measurement tools.  I like these two.

Benchmarking your site is easy: go to the speed test website and enter the url of your site and a few others you’d like to use as a comparison.  I’ll use www.google.com here, though for many of us (including the bizjournal) comparisons to Google are unfair given their access to costly hardware.  You might opt to enter another, lower tiered site (perhaps someone else in your market space) to see how your server fares to similar sites.  Once you submit the URLs, the website will return speed statistics, similar to those in the image below (from Freshtraffic):

It’s the last column on the right that we’re interested in as it is normalized for content size.  Here we see that the BizJournal, hosted on a shared webserver, fares pretty poorly to both our home site, which is on a dedicated server, and Google, which is, well, Google.

And therein lay the quickest way to optimize the server hosting your content - upgrade to a better server type (i.e., from shared to virtual dedicated or dedicated).  It’s more expensive and for many, the transition is not sustainable.  But if you’ve got the money to afford the ramp up in speed and your monthly traffic is high enough that impatient traffic loss is of significant size, then the upgrade may well be worth the money.  If upgrading to a new server type is too expensive, try benchingmarking against other webhosting companies to see if they provide a bigger bang for the buck.

2.  Content optimization

You have much more control over content optimization.  Remember, we’re chasing the metric of load time, so if your page is really, really big, even a super fast server will load it slowly.  As a result, if you’re unhappy with total load time, take action decrease the size of the file(s) you’re loading.  Consider the following:

• Decrease the size of your home or splash page.  If consumers usually enter your site through one page, cut that page down just to the essentials.  Google is an expert at this: the homepage is simply a form.  Because there’s no unnecessary content at the home page, consumers never have to wait for Google to get ready.
• Cut back on the images.  Graphic rich content is easily one of the biggest causes of large file size.  Consider cutting the number of images you present or saving the images in a compact file format such as GIF or PNG.  Most images don’t need to be high resolution on the web, so cutting back on this element can also save space.
• Optimize your software.  If you have software running under the hood between page loads and you aren’t using an out of the box software package, you may consider improving the efficiency of your code.  This is a lengthy topic in its own right, so I’ll leave suggestions to the experts.

A few other authors have commented on the topic of speed optimization and if it’s a topic you’re interested in, I suggest checking out this post at DailyArtisan and accessing the resources available at WebSiteOptimization.  Of course, we’re always happy to answer questions and comments, so please feel free to send them in.

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