GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 27 - February 2014

Love at first site Speed up your WordPress affiliate website to reduce the bounce rate By Dan Horvat N obody likes to wait. Have you ever vis- ited a website and lost your patience before it finished loading? Of course you have – every Web surfer has had that ex- perience. Now imagine that a Web surfer on your site has money on his card and an itchy finger to gamble it all away on slots. You had a great offer for him, and he would have taken it, but he didn’t stick around for long enough. Your Web page’s long loading time stood between you and profit. And it doesn’t happen only to gam- bling affiliates. Google and Amazon both lost a small fortune at one point over a 0.5-second delay in loading time, and one study among 33 major retailers in the U.S. showed that websites loading in two seconds are generating 74 percent more conversions than sites loading in eight seconds. Internet users are spoiled and expect an instant response. Anything above 0.1 seconds and the response is not perceived as instant, and one second is the rough limit for not interrupting the user’s flow of thought. Since 2010, Google has been using page loading speed as a minor ranking fac- tor, but the effort Google.com puts into speeding up its own site can tell you how important speed really is. There are good reasons why Google.com design is mini- malistic, and loading speed is one of them. “Since 2010, Google has been using page loading speed as a minor ranking factor, but the effort Google.com puts into speeding up its own site can tell you how important speed really is.” 34 Speed up your WordPress site

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