Best Ways to Improve Your Landing Page Speed
In this blog post, you’ll learn why your landing pages may be slow and discover the practical steps to increase the load speed of your landing pages.
Top 5 ways to improve your landing page speed:
Why a fast load speed is paramount for any landing page
If your landing page doesn’t load quickly enough, it may significantly increase your bounce rate and hurt your ability to drive conversions.
According to Google's research, visitors are likelier to leave right away when a web page is slow to load. A three-second delay in loading time increases the chances of a bounce by 32 percent. And if it takes five seconds for a page to load, the probability of a bounce goes up by a whopping 90 percent! That’s why landing page speed testing is a process that must be a part of any ongoing landing page audit.
If a landing page takes five seconds to load, the probability of a bounce goes up by 90 percent.
In one of our previous blog posts, we discussed what a good landing page load speed is. This time, we’re looking at the exact steps you can take to boost the load speed of your landing page.
Top 5 reasons why your landing pages may be slow and how to improve their speed
While there are many more factors to consider when optimizing your web page speed, since we’ve focused our attention specifically on landing pages and not regular website pages, the factors below are the most important.
1. Your media files are too large
The larger the files on a web page, such as images, videos, and other media, the longer it takes to download and render them, resulting in slower page load speed.
How to fix: Optimizing file sizes by compressing images, videos, and other media. Advanced landing page builders like PagePro by Marcom Robot or Unbounce provide integrated image compression capabilities.
2. Your landing pages are too long
Longer landing pages will likely have a larger file size as they contain more content and resources, such as images, videos, and scripts. The larger the file size, the longer it takes to download, especially for visitors with slow internet connections or older devices. Additionally, longer landing pages may require more time to render in the browser, contributing to slower page load speeds.
How to fix: Keeping your landing pages nice and short is a crucial landing page best practicelanding page best practices. The optimum length is around two full scrolls.
3. Your landing pages have too many scripts
Digital marketing professionals often rely on third-party scripts, such as analytics tracking codes, social media widgets, and advertising scripts, to track the performance of their marketing campaigns. These scripts can add extra load time to a web page, requiring additional requests to external servers.
How to fix: Review the list of scripts running in the background. Consider trimming it down and leaving only the truly necessary ones. Best landing page builders, such as Marcom Robot and Unbounce, can easily manage your scripts via a dedicated scripts center.
4. Your server response time is slow (not your fault)
The more time it takes for the web server where your landing pages are hosted to respond to a “load” request from a user's browser, the slower your overall landing page speed is. Slow server response time can result from suboptimal server configuration, remote hosting location, and inadequate server load.
How to fix: The best thing you can do here is to choose a well-known hosting provider. Cheap hosting doesn’t necessarily automatically translate to poor performance, but you should at least do your due diligence when selecting one for your landing pages. Landing page constructors usually come with a free domain where you can test out and even create your first landing pages. You’re also able to add your custom domain for landing pages.
5. Your landing page builder doesn’t have a CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers distributed geographically, and stores cached copies of your website or landing page content. When a visitor accesses your landing pages, the content is delivered from the nearest CDN server, reducing the time it takes to load the page.
How to fix: Implementing a CDN can help improve page load speed, especially for users in different geographic locations. Make sure CDN is part of your selection criteria for the best landing page builder.