Improve Your Landing Page’s Loading Times With This One Trick

You have just 3 seconds to load your page before people leave.

Anything more than that, and money is flat out lost.

“The average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds, according to a new analysis. Yet 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. That’s a big problem.” Daniel An, Google, 2017

As a frontend developer, that’s something we always have to have in mind for normal pages.

But for landing pages in your campaigns?

It’s critical.

You better serve the best service possible when you’re introducing your business to your leads.

But how do you do that?

There are two ways.

You can either:

• Help increase your lead’s download speed (Use services like CDNs that offer multiple servers across the globe, increasing the chance it takes less time to download the same amount of data. Unbounce and Instapages have partnerships that do that for example.)
• You decrease how much your lead’s have to download.

When you’re a developer, the only factor you can control is amount of data.

But how do you do that?

By optimizing.

You see, browsers are programs too.

Although they sometimes seem like black magic gateways that give us access to this wild thing we call the internet.

What they really do is make requests to a server to download stuff…

You download that stuff…

And then when a good chunk of things are downloaded, it reads the code and builds it on your computer locally.

That’s why I can use a developer tool to edit things on any website without worry of it editing anywhere else permanently.

Editing cledogwalk.com’s homepage and then refreshing. Now THAT’S black magic.

And once I hit refresh, all my changes go away, since new data is downloaded.

But then how do I optimize pages to reduce the amount of data?

Through the sexy, sexy topic of compression.

Compression is the truest black magic of all.

It grabs data, packs it up nice and tight and spits it back out without losing quality.

For example, let’s use an online image compressor to show you.

Here all we have to do is find one, upload an image file, you wait a little and…

Went from 1.58MB -> 322KB.

Tada, you can redownload an even smaller version of the same file.

And you don’t lose quality:

Example image from Compressor.io

For frontend developers it’s great, cause that means I can make images smaller, more “compact” and not lose any data…

FOR FREE.

This landing page for example is filled to the brim with super high quality images.

If you didn’t compress all the images, you better believe it would take a few seconds to load.

Seconds that you don’t have.

So compress your images (and your code through minification if your CDM doesn’t do it automatically for you).

Because you lose money if you don’t.

There are a lot of bad landing pages out there. Help me fix that.

Every Wednesday, I send out an insightful idea on how to improve landing pages for marketing campaigns. You can sign up for that here.