Online shoppers are notoriously impatient, in fact, even a delay as small as one second can cause a sharp decline in page views, conversions and consumer satisfaction rates. And since Google includes site speed among one of the many factors its uses to determine position in the SERPs, a slow website can cost you your rankings too.
If you haven’t done so already, it’s important to analyse your site’s speed, and check back on it regularly. There are some great resources for doing this, including Google’s own PageSpeed Insights, as well as Website Grader, both of which will give you some specific pointers on where your site is falling short. The results can seem a little alarming, but don’t worry: most solutions are fairly quick and easy to implement.
So, how can you speed things up? Here are 3 essential solutions to improve your hotel website’s speed.
1. Optimize Images
Images are one of the biggest culprits when it comes to lagging load times.
To optimise your images, you need to make sure they are scaled appropriately. A big mistake many webmasters make is to use large images and then scale them down to a smaller size using CSS. The problem is the web browser still loads the images at full size, which means your guests are left waiting longer than they should be to take a glimpse at your room photos.
To resolve this issue, either scale your images before you upload them to your property’s website, or compress them, using a free tool like tinypng.com to reduce size without compromising on quality.
2. Enable Browser Caching
There’s no need to make travel shoppers download the same things over and over again each time they load a page.
By enabling browser caching, your website will temporarily store a small amount of data on your audience’s devices. That way, there’ll be no wait for your guests every time they visit your page.
3. Compression
Compression can increase your page speed by drastically reducing the size of your HTML and CSS files – potentially by as much as 70%! That amounts to a whopping amount of data your guests won’t have to wait to download. Think of it like putting your website into a zip file.
How to implement compression depends on your server setting, if you’re unsure, contact eTourism to see what we can do.
As internet shoppers expect a richer and richer online experience, the size of our website pages will grow. Inevitably, site speed may lag.
As marketers, it’s up to us to curb slow load times – remember, even a one second delay can mean a lost booking.
What are you doing to boost your hotel’s website speed? Let us know in the comments below!
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