Well, 2019 is all about the speed and pages loading longer than 3 seconds record a 50% decrease in the number of site visitors. All your hard work and time taken to design and create a converting landing page will be for naught, if people leave the page before it finishes loading. It is crucial for every affiliate to take note of and to monitor their page loading speeds as it becomes equivalent to killing your investments.
If you noticed that your page loads slowly here is what you can do first. Test it with Google.
Google has an extensive database that contains a variety of valuable information. Run your landing page URL through Page Speed Insights. It won’t give you suggestions on what tools you can use to improve the speed, but it will definitely give you a rundown on your page and what you can do to boost the loading speed.
Here is a few tips you probably should pay attention in order to help increase the load speed of your landing pages.
Avoid Using WordPress
Everyone knows that WordPress makes it easy and convenient to build and host landing pages. It is the go-to site for every affiliates landing page, and with time, it has managed to store a large number of files and information on its database. As a result:
- WordPress is usually massive. It might make you end up losing a lot of load speed. Result – negative impact on your affiliate campaign.
- Requires you to have a full server such as a PHP server to host your landing pages on. (Don’t know PHP? Learn it.)
- Utilizing WordPress exposes you to security vulnerabilities. It is one of the most popular software platforms globally and every time it faces a security threat, your system is also susceptible to the danger.
- It prevents you from doing the number one thing you can do to speed up your landing page speed – using CDN.
Typically, almost every affiliate take a landing page and host it on the CDN.
“A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.” – Cloudflare
If you have visitors from say Europe visiting your landing page, they are always going to be loading the page from a server that is close to them rather than the other way around.
That is why using WordPress with a single server to host your landing page will have a significantly slower loading speed compared to using a CDN which has servers all over the world. CDN is very popular and is commonly used to host the substantial parts of landing pages, such as images, CSS files or JS. It is less commonly applied to host the HTML files or the website itself, though you can get a faster load time by putting everything on a CDN including the HTML file.
Use DNS
Another way of boosting your page load speed a bit more is by using a powerful DNS host. One of the best host services to use is Cloudflare. A vast majority of affiliates depend on Cloudflare’s worldwide network to optimize security, performance, and reliability of their landing pages. It’s been designed for easy setup. It also does not require additional hardware, software or changes to your landing pages code.
Setting up a CDN and Cloudflare can help you handle up to eighty percent of everything you need for your landing page load speeds. Another advantage of using Cloudflare is that it stops malicious traffic before it arrives at your origin web server.
Optimizing the images on your landing page
You should always make sure the data on your landing page is as low as possible so that it loads faster on mobile devices with slow connections. Images usually take up most of the space on your landing page, so you will want to run them all through an optimizing service (such as Kraken.io). It will compact and optimize the photos to make them much smaller file sizes without sacrificing their quality.
Moreover, avoid using images in the following format:
- BMPs or TIFFs;
- GIFs should only be used when animated images are necessary.
- PNG is a commonly used image format; however, old web browsers do not support it.
The best format to use is JPEG.
These three points are crucial and should be done on every single landing page you create, if you don’t use any automated tool to optimize your pages (such as LanderBolt). Loading time is something you have to work on regularly, you have to check up on it and work towards improving it continuously.