The Silent Conversion Killer
What is one simple thing that can slice away half of your revenue? If you are not measuring it, you may blame revenue and loss gains on randomness, or mistakenly assign it to something else.
That thing that matters oh so much is server speed.
Real numbers: One of my websites coverts at around 4-5.7%. However, an extra 10 seconds of loading time can slice that number down below 3%. When things get really bad, that number can slide down to 1%.
Whether you have an e-commerce site, or a content site, this will impact you. Friendster’s decline is largely attributed to growth problems destroying their performance. Without a prompt fix many members migrated to Myspace, and the rest is history.
If you are investing a lot of time into an advertising campaign you need to monitor page load times throughout the day. If you have a content site, make sure off-server advertisements aren’t breaking your site’s load times. If you insist on overloading your pages with images & rich media then you better be prepared to pay to ensure speed. Visitors just won’t wait around short of catching the latest nudie shots of their favorite celebrity.
Off topic, note for regular readers. I was an idiot and accidentally made a post based on a 7 year old story (argh!), which I deleted as soon as a reader pointed it out. However, I am planning a big post about parking domain names verse developing them later, possibly for late next week.
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Pingback by Coffee Break - September 15, 2007 — September 14, 2007 @ 10:24 pm
Along with server speed, there’s a few other things you can do to improve the speed of your pages.
Try and get your html as small as possible, by stripping spaces, and unnecessary tags / comments. There are some great CSS Compression tools around that will shrink the size of your css, and make your javascript files as minimal as possible.
If possible, use gzip compression when sending your pages - oh and you can gzip javascript and css files as well, which makes filesizes even smaller again.
Also, to reduce load on the server, where possible cache (on the server) anything that you are creating dynamically. Your server will only have to spend CPU building the page once, then it just sends the cached static html.
Look at the cache (browser side) headers you are sending, and send instructions to the web browser to cache the web page / css / javascript.
If you are using a database, do your best to index, optimise and normalise your database / queries. Poorly designed databases and queries can really slow page creation down as a database grows. Also, if possible, cache your queries.
Find the best balance between filesize and quality for images. I go one step further and try to work out the best combination of sliced images for smallest file size. Play with gif / jpg / png image types to see how small you can get a file for the best quality.
Well that’s all I can think of for now.
Comment by Michael Phipps — September 16, 2007 @ 7:32 am