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Last week, I received a call from a long-time AdPage client. He had a pressing question: "My webinar sign-ups on my landing page have halved compared to last month. How can that be? Everything stayed exactly the same, I just created the landing page with a different tool now. Would you take a look with me?"
I did a little test through Pingdom tool(https://tools.pingdom.com/) to determine the loading speed of the landing page. And immediately I saw that the loading speed of the had increased from 0.5 seconds to 3 seconds. The increase of 2.5 seconds has a huge impact. From Facebook Ads, "cold" traffic is sent to your landing page. Social media visitors have little patience (not just social media visitors, by the way).
In this article, I explain how to measure the loading speed of your website or landing page and how to optimize it. It is not an article for developers who want to know how to get a higher score on Google Pagespeed Insights.
You can also watch a live session on this topic at the bottom of this article.
Why is the load time of your website or landing page important?
We have less and less patience these days. We want quick customer service; we'd rather not listen to waiting music. It's the same with websites and landing pages. Does a website take too long to load? Then we drop out.
Website load time refers to the time it takes your website or landing page to fully load. You can imagine that a page that loads faster gives much better results than a landing page with a slow loading time. The site speed affects your search engine ranking, your bounce rate and your conversion rate.
Many articles have been written about how big of an impact longer loading time has on your website. I've put together a summary for you with interesting case studies and figures.
- According to Think with Google, a negative experience on mobile has a 62% impact on your visitor's buying behavior. Website speed plays a very important role here.
- According to SOASTA Google research, the speed of your website also has a huge impact on your bounce rate. TUI did a study (in collaboration with Google) to measure the correlation between website speed and bounce rate. After implementing some new processes and technologies, tui.se saw a 31% decrease in bounce rates and a 78% reduction in load times.
- A study by Google (conducted across 11 million landing pages from 213 countries) shows that when the load time goes from 1 second to 10 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 123%!
So it is always true: the faster the better. So should you have a landing page where the speed is between 2-3 seconds where you are already getting good results, it pays to reduce the speed to 0.5 -1 second.
Tips to optimize the speed of your website and landing page
So, as mentioned in the above articles, it is very important to improve the loading speed of your landing page or website. But how do you tackle that?
Is your website fast enough? You can easily check this. There are several tools available for this. We list a number of tools for you:
The above tools are all reliable and give a good idea about the performance of your landing page or website. In addition, it also gives insight into what points you can address to make your website or landing page faster.
Do you have a Wordpress website and it loads slowly? There are a number of plugins you can install to optimize the website. For example, you can read more about them in this article. The plugins can certainly have an impact but often they do not solve the root of the problem. We therefore recommend that you contact a Wordpress expert or Freelancer who has experience in optimizing websites for loading speed.
Did you create your landing page in an email marketing automation tool(such as MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue etc.)? Then you often see that the load time is still too long. This is because the elements on the page are not loaded efficiently. Because of this, you see that even with short pages, such as a webinar sign-up, the speed comes to over 2 seconds.
Getting started to improve your website's load time
To optimize your website or landing page yourself for better loading speed takes an awful lot of time. That's why we recommend working with an expert who knows how to optimize loading speed. By having a few smart things improved you can make a huge difference in your organic search results, bounce rate but also definitely on the number of conversions.
We at AdPage (or we at WC Duck) make sure that all our landing pages, quizzes and popups are optimized for the best possible loading speed. Old clients come back to us for a reason because they see the added value.
During a live session, we discussed this topic before. Watch the recording back below.