As you know, the speed of your website has a direct correlation to the number of conversions you get. Because of that, we test the 60 Second Marketer website on a regular basis to be sure our site loads quickly. Here’s a chart showing how fast our site loaded this summer. (We used Pingdom’s excellent Website Speed Test to track the results.)
As you can see, we tested the site in the morning and in the evening to see if there were any major differences between the two times of day. Overall, the differences were minor.
You can also see that when we first ran the test, the site speed was all over the map before settling in at about 2 seconds. 2 seconds is faster than 70% of all other websites tested by Pingdom, so we felt pretty good about that.
How do we keep our site optimized?
Some of the tools we use to keep our site humming along quickly include super fast, super secure hosting from Synthesis, a company founded by Brian Clark. We also use an excellent plugin called W3 Cache to help optimize our performance. And, of course, we use Yoast to give us additional insights into how our site is optimized for SEO.
The bottom line is that we spend a lot of time and effort to make sure the site runs as smoothly as possible.
Why do we put so much effort into this? That might be summed up in the infographic below created by our friends at WebPerformanceToday.com. It’s packed with useful information on why speed is such an important part of your website’s overall performance.
Check it out. But most of all — put what you’ve learned here today into action on your site.
About the Author: Jamie Turner is the CEO of the 60 Second Marketer and 60 Second Communications, a marketing communications firm that helps businesses use the science of marketing to grow their sales and revenues. He is the co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile” and is a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.
View Comments (2)
Just be careful you don't mix up correlation with causation. If you shave the download time in half by changing the design in any way, it may be the design that lifts conversions, and not the speed increase.
I also get skeptical with things like:
"Firefox reduced average load time by 2.2 seconds and increased downloads by 15.4%. With 275,000 daily visitors, this translates to 10 million additional downloads per year."
Perhaps that 15.4% increase is just impatient people who were hitting refresh instead of waiting for the page to load. If that's the case, you can't extrapolate an additional 10 million downloads per year. I'm not saying those stats are false--and I know that speed plays a significant role in conversions--but many times there are other factors involved, or a combination of several things that can impact conversions.
You must also consider the perceived load time. It may take the page 10 seconds to fully load, but sometimes you can set things up so the initial viewport content is downloaded and displayed in 2 seconds, while images and other resources are lazy-loaded or deferred so that users don't notice the continued download of resources. But this needs to be done correctly. I've noticed a new trend where sites are loading content into the page in a way that shifts everything around and makes it very disorienting. For example, sites are loading all their content and rendering the page quickly, but after the page is displayed and users have started to read, the website loads a large ad at the top of the page which pushed all the content down, and the text that was being read is now somewhere else. That makes a terrible user experience, and unfortunately it's becoming commonplace today.
Ty, this is why I'm so glad you're a member of our community. The insights you provide (on a regular basis) are spot on.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I agree -- you have to dig into the data a bit to make sure the insights are accurate.
We had an internal discussion this week about how much crap there is on the internet. (Case in point -- blog posts that say, "Best times of day to post on social media" which are pure garbage.) The 60 Second Marketer has been as guilty as anyone on posting stuff like that, which is why we're going upstream with more high-level posts based on data and science. Stay tuned.
Thanks for being part of our community. Your insights and comments are always welcome.
-- Jamie