Is it Worth the Time and Money to Invest in Speeding up Your Site?

Is it worth going from 3 to 2.5 seconds of load-time for your website? The big jump from 5 to 3 seconds is usually easy but what science is backing pushing for an even faster site? Will conversions increase of is it time for A/B testing?

Basically, on a higher level, there are two ways you can make a site faster;

1. The manual option where you can have a developer or an engineer execute different technical techniques to speed up the site
2. The automated option where you invest in a service like Yottaa or different pieces of web infrastructure like CDN to solve different performance problems.

Let’s say your website takes 6 seconds to load and you invest in a few of the techniques in question and manage to bring the load speed down to 3 seconds. Is it going to be worth further time and money to get that number to say 2 seconds?

When deciding this kind of thing, there are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself, since in the first place, you want a clear answer:

• What should you be aiming for?
• How much would you be willing to invest in your own time or budget to increase the site performance?

The reality is it’s different for each individual site simply because each is different from the other. They are unique in the way they have been built, the kind of content that’s on them and so on. Thus, the hit list or things you would do to make improvements on each website is different. What else is going to be different is the cost and time associated with executing those tests.

As Lucy Orloski, the conversion marketing specialist at Yottaa pointed out in her presentation at a Convert Academy webinar; if you can manage to get your site down to 3 seconds, you’re doing very well. And if you can get it below 3 seconds, it will no doubt pay off for you. It should be a priority to get the site to 3 seconds, and if after that there are relatively inexpensive things you can do to speed it up even further, absolutely go for it.

If you notice on your list that performance problems still persist, and they would take a considerable about of time and money to work through, then it’s probably not worth it to get your site down from 3 seconds to 2.5 seconds. This is specific to you and your own situation though: your individual business.

So, what steps can you take to increase your own site speed? This is the kind of stuff that exists on a spectrum. As conversion marketers, the goal here should be to really target that 3-second mark because that’s where people’s attention spans are. If your site is not loading within 3 seconds, what you’re doing is losing people. And if you can manage to get below that 3-second bar, you will be losing less of that. After that, you will have a bit of breathing space and wiggle room to make further improvements you wish to make.

Let this serve as a guide post for you when you start thinking about investing in speeding up your website. We recommend site speed optimization before focusing on A/B testing software” href=”https://www.convert.com/features/” target=”_blank”>A/B testing.

Here is the link to the full webinar on speed optimization for conversion improvements