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Make your site load faster to increase sales

Longer pageload times = more customers leaving your site. No surprise there. But it's worth digging into just how much money you might be leaving on the table.

If a page takes longer than three seconds to load, nearly half of your users will bounce — pageload speed matters that much. For Mobify, every 100-millisecond improvement in their homepage's load time resulted in a 1.11% increase in conversions. Likewise, when Mozilla reduced the pageload time for the Firefox landing page by 2.2 seconds, they increased their conversions by 15.4%.

Here's where you can start: Check your current website speed at Pingdom or WebpageTest, then go through this list and see what measures you can take to speed things up. In the meantime, here's a quick fix to give the illusion of a faster load-time: Move your stylesheet references to the <head> of your HTML document so that each page loads progressively from the top.

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  1. 3

    Not sure who shared this on twitter a while back but here's a related, super useful tactic (if you're using tools like Hotjar, Intercom etc.) to decrease time to interactive:

    1. Load the page with no heavy scripts
    2. Wait for a scroll event
    3. Wait a further second
    4. Then load all the heavy scripts

    Here's a code snippet to delay script firing:
    window.addEventListener('scroll', () => setTimeout(() => {
    // load your scripts here
    }, 1000),
    { once: true}
    );

  2. 2

    👏This is so important for anyone running a business via website - whether it's a Shopify site, a site built with no-code tools, or a self-hosted SaaS on Heroku. Too many sites are missing out on free wins by sometimes just moving a tag from the top to the bottom of the page, or vice versa. It could literally be the most efficient use of time for an IndieHacker (1 minute to move the tag, X% improvement in conversion rate)

    Coincidentally, today is the first day I'm asking for beta testers for a tool I built to track your landing page's performance[1]. If anyone's interested in how to improve their site's performance, please check it out here and let me know what you think: http://landlifter.com (completely free while in beta)

    [1] LandLifter uses Google's Lighthouse tool which analyzes SEO performance, speed, accessibility, and more.

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