The most important parameters of a good site

Conversion

When there is a desire to create a site for your business, one of the first words that will be mentioned by the promotion specialists will be the word “conversion”. And then the graphs and numbers in percent will go. And though this parameter, indeed, is important for the site, there is nothing complicated in it. Conversion presupposes the number of users who have performed some effective for us action on the site (purchase or order) in relation to the number of all users browsing the site. Of course, this number is very important for us.

The reference value of this indicator will differ from industry to industry. But, in general, the bigger this indicator is, the better.

Figure 1- TOP-20 retail consumer sites with high conversion rates based on the results of the research of OnlineMarketIntelligence for 2014. Source: Rwr.ru.

It would seem, work on conversion and the site will become effective. And, for this it is enough to create a beautiful design, offer a quality product and work on the customers interest. All this does not always have a direct reference to the site development. But the matter is also that this indicator cannot be increased in isolation from other indicators. Further about it.

Accessibility

The site should work stably. The visitor should be able to use it at any time of the day and from any place in the world. The most beautiful and interesting site will not sell your super-quality and useful product if users cannot get to it.

In addition to the problems with access to the site that deter the users, they affect the “friendship” with the search engines. This is due to the fact that robots – search engines from time to time go to the site and record cases of inability to “get through” to it.

To analyze this parameter, there are a sufficient number of tools, both free and paid with advanced features. Screenshots of the reports issued by such tools are given below.

Figure 2-Report on Google Analytics site work

Figure 3-Analysis of the Yandex Metric site work

Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of the site visitors, from the total number of visitors who came to the landing page, and then left the site within 1-15 seconds.

This figure is believed to depend on the site theme and the content quality. If the content is not interesting, or the subject is narrow, most visitors do not stay for long. The normal bounce rate will differ for each specific topic. However, an important factor is the speed of the site downloading. Since the time that the interested visitor agrees to wait for until the site is fully loaded varies between 3 and 5 seconds. Wherein, the initial download should begin already in a period of up to one second.

Speed

No matter what is mentioned at the end – this is the most important indicator. It can have an impact on accessibility, indexing, and site conversion. This factor is universal for any site, but is especially crucial for online stores. One or two seconds delay can play a decisive role.

Figure 4-The dependence of the conversion on site load speed

As you can see from the graph, the site downloading time, exceeding the mark of 5 seconds makes the site almost useless.

Losses due to speed can be roughly estimated using a simple formula:

Loss = speed in seconds * number of visitors * conversion rate * average receipt

There are tools that will calculate the approximate ones for you. For example, the Айри.рф service provides data in this form:

Figure 5-calculation of daily losses due to speed

Thus, you can determine the daily loss in money. The good news is that these losses can be eliminated by speeding up your site. That is, there is good potential for your business here.

How to speed up your site

Using the above or other similar services for site analysis, you will get a list of recommendations from these services. Do not neglect them. But, still, we will list the main recommendations that are relevant for all sites.

Code optimization

It is necessary to reduce the page size. Do not post a large number of media files on the site. Instead, use third-party services for video hosting. Reduce the number of scripts and complex CSS rules at the beginning of the download. Discard unnecessary widgets. Achieve minimum number of calls to the database.

The most important at the beginning

In order to keep the user, show him at least some of the information while the rest of the page content is loading. It is natural to assume that for this it is necessary to analyze and structure the page contents, highlight the most important and show this information to the user first. The main thing is to ensure that the first information is delivered to the site visitor during the first second.

Use cashing

A small cache size results in the removal of pages viewed by the user and every time you visit it, you need to download the information again, which negatively affects the productivity.

Increase the size of the cache and thus you can significantly speed up the client’s repeated access to the web pages, as well as reduce the load on the server.

Critical CSS-rules

CSS rules can be important and secondary. Critical rules are those that are necessary to display the original screen. They should be loaded in the first place, without being delayed by any JS-scripts and the like.

Fast hosting

Do not economize on hosting. In terms of increasing the speed of the site, the use of so-called Shared Hosting is the most unfortunate decision. It is preferable to use cloud services. In any case, you should carefully approach to the choice of hosting, pay attention to the allocated resource of RAM, as well as the type of drives.

Continuous monitoring

Speed and accessibility of the site must be checked constantly. This will allow to solve problems quickly, without waiting for losses in finances, to track trends, to prevent hidden problems.

ContentDeliveryNetwork (CDN)

This is a content delivery network, the advantage of which is the distribution of data at geographically distant sites, thus bringing this data closer to the end user.

Figure 6-CDN scheme

Proper construction of such a network can significantly speed up the site work. But there can be a reverse situation. In this case, the qualification of technical specialists dealing with this issue is important. If possible, involve several technical experts for consultation to get the most correct decision.

Instead of summary

The importance of the site work speed is difficult to overestimate. All efforts to promote the website, attract customers, advertising costs and the development of cool design can be brought to nothing if the client just does not wait for the content to download. In addition to the failed transaction, the owner of the site pits the reputation of the business under attack. Therefore, if you have similar problems, do not neglect the speeding up of your site.