According to multinational professional services firm PwC About 80% of Internet users prioritize speed, convenience, hospitality, and knowledgeable support as the key factors that make up great customer service.

This survey exposes how important it is for the company's website to meet customer expectations and exceed them, if possible.

The speed of the website is one of the most measured aspects for the organic positioning or SEO of a web page. Therefore, every second lost in loading the website will be directly related to the loss of sales opportunities.

The WPO defines a series of criteria that are intended to help correct aspects that may be affecting the performance of the website and thus increase the affinity of visitors with the site or blog.

What is the WPO?

Website Performance Optimizationor optimization of web performance, in Spanish, is the set of techniques that are recommended to be applied to a website in order to improve the loading speed and, with it, the user experience.

Website performance evaluation should be done page by page. And it is that, sometimes, within the same site, some of them have a quick or acceptable response, but other heavier ones encourage the user to abandon and search elsewhere.

The primary objective of any website is to retain the user for as long as possible consuming that offer that has been designed for him.

In addition, it is illogical to think of having a website that expels the client with poor performance, after investing any amount of money in all kinds of acquisition strategies.

Why is the WPO Important for Your Website?

Although the foregoing is a general idea of ​​its importance, below, you will find each of the aspects that are benefited when executing WPO techniques or optimization of the performance of a website:

1.- Improve organic positioning

Pages displaying search results are dynamic. The search engine's algorithm often does some kind of experiments and ranks a piece of content in the first places to assess the acceptance of users with respect to certain criteria.

Among those criteria are the Bounce Rate and the loading speed, the latter considered a Core Web Vital or vital web indicator. So, if you want to achieve a good organic positioning and in a sustained way, it is necessary to pay attention to these metrics.

2.- Increase the chances of conversion

If the user cannot enter your website or blog, they will not be able to consume your content and will not access those conversion tools or Lead Magnet in which you have invested so much effort and money to increase your sales.

A good loading speed will allow the visitor to successfully navigate your entire website and, if possible, to enter the conversion or sales funnel that you have established to generate those profits that every business requires.

3.- Increase the Return on Investment

When users are retained by the website and move up the conversion or sales funnel, the Return on Investment is favored.

Every action and resource within marketing requires money, time and effort. The way to obtain a reward is through a return on investment that favors the profits of the business.

So the speed of the website and the user experience are aspects that are vital to take into account for the healthy growth of the online business.

How to Improve the Loading Speed ​​of Your Website?

There are some strategies you can implement to improve loading speed and user experience:

1.- Minify CSS and JS content

It is the separation of CSS and JavaScript content into compressed files that discard what does not contribute to the functioning of the site. This decreases the size of website files and HTTP requests.

2.- Use CDN or Content Delivery Network

A CDN distributes the website on several servers that are located in different locations.

In this way, when a request occurs or a user wants to access the site, it will load faster since the first server to respond will be the one that is closest, but the site can be served from multiple servers at the same time, if necessary.

3.- Use lazy loading of images

Also called Lazy Loading, it is a technique that allows images to be loaded only when they belong to the visible navigation area. In other words, only the elements that are in the focus or space consulted at a given time by the user will be loaded.

One of the ways to do this lazy loading is by adding the Loading attribute and setting the img tag to lazy, as shown below:

<img src="image1.png" loading="lazy" alt="…">

Tools to Analyze the WPO of Your Website

If you want to analyze the performance of your website, you can do it with the help of these tools:

1. light house, Google's free tool that will help you to know the details of your website.
2. PageSpeed ​​Insights, another powerful and free tool from Google that will indicate the aspects to improve on your website.
3. Pingdom Website Speed ​​Test, will help you determine the aspects that can cause bottlenecks and reduce the response of your website.

Conclusion

The WPO is a set of techniques that will help you improve the loading speed of your website and thus the user experience. In addition to improving the organic positioning of the site, you can increase the conversion and ROI of your business.

To optimize the performance of your website it is recommended:

●       Minify CSS and JS content, to reduce disk space as well as HTTP requests.

●       Use CDN so that the site can be delivered from different servers.

●       Use lazy loading of images so that only what the user has in focus at the moment is served.

The tools you can use to evaluate your website are:

●       Lighthouse.

●       PageSpeed ​​Insights.

●       Pingdom Website Speed ​​Test.

Thanks for your time ;-)