Singapore is one of the leading countries in eCommerce. Many businesses here have shifted online to serve the growing market. According to a survey by Visa, 26% of Singaporeans shop online once a week. In 2019, the country’s eCommerce market is around US$4,906m. These numbers highlight the potential for businesses in the country.

Leveraging High Loading Speeds
Your business needs a high-performance website to harness the potential in this market. One of the major drawbacks for a business website is slow loading speed and this is one area you have to address. In the digital platform, speed is essential to keep visitors on your site and increase the chances of conversion.

Research shows a single-second delay on a page reduces views by 11%.  A one-second delay in a mobile page loading speed can cut conversions by as much as 7%.
 
What’s more, poor loading speeds affect your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts leading to poor ranking. As Google and other search engines emphasize user experience (UX), page loading speeds become even more crucial.

To reduce bounce rates, cart abandonment, and increase sales conversions, you have to optimize your business’ website loading speeds. Working with a digital agency in Singapore is a major step in overcoming the challenges of poor loading speeds.

Tips to Boost Site Page Speeds
How do you optimize your website’s page speeds? Below are some crucial factors to consider:

1.   Analyze Page Speeds
A site audit is crucial to determine the loading speeds. Most business owners have no idea about the poor performance of their websites regarding speeds. You can use online speed audit tools such as Google PageSpeedInsights or Pingdom, among others. These tools track the site speeds and identify glitches causing the poor speeds.

2.           Reduce Redirects
If your site pages suffer poor loading speeds, it is time to minimize HTTP requests. Most of our page’s loading time might be going to downloading images, stylesheets, and scripts. There’s an HTTP request for each of these page components, which results in slow loading.
Confirm the number of HTTP requests made for each page. Consider minimizing the number of files you have on each page for better loading speeds.

3.           Upgrade Your Web Hosting
Many businesses in Singapore go for the cheapest hosting services in a bid to cut costs. However, this has an impact on the performance of their sites. The shared bandwidth and limited resources available on such plans affect the loading speeds on your website.

Upgrading your web hosting plan to a dedicated one will have a tremendous impact on the site loading speeds.

4.           Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) has distributed data centers, each with a copy of a specific website stored in multiple geographic locations. When a website user browses, the CDNs deliver content based on the geographic locations of the user.

The content delivery is faster and seamless and there’s no loading lag on the pages. Your digital marketing agency in Singapore will recommend CDNs such as Amazon Cloudfront to boost page loading speeds. This is one tool you have to integrate in your content marketing strategy.

5.           Minify and Combine Files
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files are necessary for your website’s performance and appearance. However, they are also large and also add to the number of HTTP requests, thus reducing page loading speeds.

You can minify these files to delete obsolete formatting, code, and whitespace. Consider merging JavaScript files into a single file, merge CSS files, reduce or eliminate plugins that require individual Script and/or CSS files.

6.           Utilize Browser Caching
Every search on your website leads to the creation of a cache containing the information requested.  The information remains on the user’s browser meaning your site won’t have to send another HTTP request when the same visitor searches the information. It reduces HTTP requests, thus optimizing page loading speeds.

7.           Optimize Page Images
Images make a website beautiful, but many website owners misuse them leading to poor page loading speeds. Large images make your website slow, which in turn affects conversions. Consider using a plug-in to optimize your images as they load.

8.           Leverage Google PageSpeed
Using the Google PageSpeed Module is a smart idea to speed up your page loading speeds. This tool helps manage the pages, CSS, JavaScript, images, among other things. By changing the assets on a web page, the software helps improve speed.

9.           Above-the-Fold Content
Prioritize above the fold content to make the visitor find what they want faster. Elements above-the-fold should also come at the beginning of the HTML code for the browser to download them first.

10.        Leverage CSS3 and HTML5
Consider applying the cutting-edge and lightweight CSS3 and HTML5 framework for a faster loading website. The framework also works ideally for faster mobile pages.

Wrapping Up
In a country where most of the consumers now shop online, you have to spruce up your website to meet the growing customer demand. One way of doing this is by improving page loading speeds. It is one of the most effective strategies to stay ahead of the pack. By increasing site loading speeds, you will reduce bounce rates, boost the customer experience, and hence maximize conversions.