ommon Reasons Slow Landing Page Load Rates
Although you know that landing page loading speeds need to be improved, you aren’t sure what is causing them to slow down. There are many factors that can affect page load times. So where do you begin?
Each page of a website has multiple elements. Visitors see what they see, but there are many more hidden behind the scenes. Each feature must load when someone visits your page. This is true regardless of whether they are searching for it organically or via a paid click. It can be difficult to identify the cause of your page lag with so many components.
It doesn’t matter what compelling offer you have or how well-designed your landing pages, if your landing pages take too long to load, it won’t matter how attractive your offer is. A slow loading page can cause users to bounce and they won’t convert.
Most companies will need to spend time and effort improving page speed. It is important to continuously improve landing pages and identify the major barriers that slow down loading speeds. Here are some common reasons landing pages can be slow loading.
What is the importance of landing page speed?
Page speed is an important factor in user experience. Slow page speeds were the norm in the early days of the internet. But today it is a completely different story. From personal experience, we all know how frustrating loading page lags can prove to be. Users have become more impatient and pages that take longer to load experience higher bounce rates and a shorter average time-on page.
How long should a landing site take to load? While “as fast as possible” is the ideal answer, a page load time of 3 seconds is best. Every second is important because bounce rates increase 32% when page load speeds are increased from 1 to 3 seconds. It increases by 90% from 1 to 5 seconds.
A strong correlation exists between bounce rate and load time, so optimizing page speed should be a priority for conversion-oriented businesses. Use Google’s PageSpeedInsights quickly to determine if your landing pages require optimization. Let’s look at the causes of slow pages to find the culprits.
Common issues with landing page speed
1. JavaScript issues
JavaScript plugins are useful if you need to add dynamic content on websites. JavaScript can cause significant delays in loading web pages if it is not used correctly or misused.
How to fix: Check your JavaScript scripts, and eliminate anything that isn’t necessary. If you want to speed up page loading times, less is better.
2. Too much flash
Flash is a great tool for making landing pages interactive but it can also slow down page load speeds. Flash files that are larger than 10MB will have a greater impact on page speed.
How to fix: Reducing the Flash files’ size can significantly improve page loading speeds. Consider removing Flash elements that aren’t necessary. To replace Flash content, you can use HTML5 alternatives.
3. Images that are not optimized
A landing page’s image can speak a thousand words. However, it can slow down your site. Landing pages that are not optimized for images can be slow. Although stunning, high-resolution images look amazing, they can take a lot of bandwidth to load.
Images are not the only problem. File formats can also have an impact on your site’s loading speed.
How do you fix it? Make sure your files are not larger than 1MB. For larger images, JPEG is better than PNG. JPEG images naturally have a smaller file size than other formats such as PNG and GIF. Always optimize images for new pages, and always review and act on existing content.
4. Large media files
Many landing pages depend heavily on images and other media such as videos and audio files. Bandwidth is an essential resource that can be wasted if large media files are not properly managed. Mobile users find it difficult to load large media files. Files that are meant for desktops may take longer to load on smaller devices or mobile networks.
How do you fix it? Upload media files to the right formats and reduce the file size where possible. You can load file versions according to the device you are using. Multiple versions of the same file can be uploaded to the cloud. The version that is most suitable for your device will be used.
5. Too many HTTP requests
Every time a visitor visits your website, their web browser sends an email to the server to request information about the page. This file can contain text, images or multimedia elements. The faster the site loads, the fewer HTTP requests it must make.
How do you fix it? While there is no ideal number of HTTP requests, you can test your pages to see how many requests they are currently requesting and determine what you can remove. There are several things you can do to reduce HTTP requests, including reducing the number and size of your images files.
6. Manufacture of no caching methods
Caching can dramatically improve the speed of your site’s pages. You can cache frequently used data points and serve it from the cached memory on subsequent requests. This speeds up data retrieval.
How to fix: Start now with browser/HTTP caching and server-side caching.
7. Bulky code
Clean code is not only best practice, but it also speeds up page loading times. Bulky code with excessive white space, lazy CSS, empty lines, inline styling and unneeded comments can make your website stylesheet larger, which can slow down your page.
How to fix: Reduce the size of your code by removing unnecessary elements. Minifying is a process that reduces file size. This cleaning process can be done using several online tools that are less familiar to coders.
8. Not implementing gZIP compression
gZIP Compression can be a quick way to speed up page loading speeds. It consolidates all of your web objects into a single container. This reduces the amount of data that is transferred between your server, and the browsers of visitors. Compression speeds up response times by serving requested content faster.
How to fix it Enabling the gZIP compression should be a standard practice. You should enable gZIP compression if you don’t use it.
9. Use a Content Delivery Network service (CDN) instead
CDNs can be a great tool for improving page speed, especially if your website is popular. The content delivery network distributes the server load to multiple locations, and the nearest server provides data to local users. The goal of a CDN is to deliver high availability and speed by geographically distributing the service, which speeds up loading time.
How to fix: Many websites have trouble loading pages quickly and improving performance with traditional hosting services. So they turn to CDNs. Although they are not required, these are worth investigating.
10. Too many plugins
Many WordPress websites have many plugins behind the scenes. Each plugin makes its own file request, which can slow down load times. Each plugin needs a CSS file as well as JavaScript to load. Too many plugins can slow down loading times and cause site crashes.
How do you fix it? Check your plugins. You may have inactive or outdated ones that are not needed anymore. Your site’s speed will drop if you don’t remove dangerous or inactive plugins. Consider which plugins you are most important and reduce any unnecessary weight.
11. To win, prioritize landing page speed to win
It can take a lot of time to reduce page speed, especially if there are multiple issues. It is easier to implement best practices right from the beginning than to remove elements from pages. Before you start building a page, you should determine the speed at which it will load. This is what Google calls your “performance budget.” Next, create new landing pages within your budget.
You want to create fast loading landing pages. Instapage’s Thor Render Engine ™ is a responsive rendering engine that captures visitor attention quickly.
Sign up today for an Instapage demo to find out how Instapage can deliver 3x faster loading landing pages
