5 easy optimizations for a faster website
Website visitors spend more time on a site when it loads quickly, allowing them to navigate to more areas and increasing the chances of conversion. If pages don’t load fast enough, users quickly become frustrated and drop off the site. That’s especially true for mobile users, who want to make a purchase or get information in as few steps as possible.
There is no shortage of strategies you can use to improve your site load time. But admittedly, some are easier than others.
That’s what one online retailer discovered when they made 5 simple optimizations that increased their blog traffic by 20%.
What they did
iHeartRaves.com is an online retailer and manufacturer of festival fashion. When the company noticed that mobile users were dropping off at higher rates than desktop users, they knew they had some work to do.
To increase mobile speed, the company made 5 relatively simple optimizations:
- They compressed images on all pages so that pages loaded much faster, without hurting image quality.
- They used JavaScript minification and compressed all source code, eliminating excess code and optimizing the remaining code so that it loaded faster and more efficiently.
- They prioritized the load order of scripts and also reduced the number of scripts being called.
- They got rid of any image assets and functionality that were not necessary for mobile users.
- They used AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) on their blog and static pages, which lowered page speed load time from 5+ seconds to less than 1 second.
The Result
These optimizations resulted in a 20% increase to the iHeartRaves blog traffic. And since the blog is a fundamental piece of the company’s sales funnel (helping to guide users along the purchasing process), the increase in traffic naturally boosted sales too.
In an interview with MarketingSherpa, iHeartRaves CEO Brian Lim said, “Bringing more traffic to our blog increases the likelihood of making a sale as customers continue to navigate through the site.”
