Your monitoring mechanisms won't even show you this as a metric to focus on. However, the load time is indeed crucial for conversion.
This time, let's look into load times more closely and talk about some of the common methods of improving a slow landing page.
First of all, I hope that you're using WordPress as the platform to run your whole affiliate site. WordPress is by far the best, most popular, and the easiest to use system out there. It's also what I'm focusing on in this post.
Measuring load time
The first thing you have to do is measure your landing page's load time. This can be done with Google Analytics, just like described in the aforementioned post, or you can use an external speed tester by Pingdom Tools.
Just input your landing page's URL, press "Test now" and see what the result is.
Most of the time, any score that's above 5 seconds needs improvement. The average internet user won't wait longer than that to access your landing page. Additionally, considering the fact that it's PPC landing pages we're talking about here, you really don't want to lose the visitor due to big load times when you're paying for traffic...
Optimization plugins
Analysis. A good plugin to start with that will help you to eventually lover the load time of your landing page is P3.
It will basically take a look at the other plugins you use on your site and tell you which ones are taking the most time to load.
After doing such an analysis, you can delete all slow plugins and find quicker and more optimized alternatives. This thing alone can make your site even twice as fast as it is now.
Images. Another plugin on my short list is very useful if you're using images on your landing page. WP Smush.it, will optimize your images with no loss of quality and convert them to smaller file sizes. The simple outcome is that small files load quicker.
Database. Every page in WordPress, including your landing page, works by displaying content that's actually stored in the database on your server. This means that every piece of content needs to be fetched before it can be displayed, and this process takes a moment too.
The solution, therefore, is to get some plugins that will optimize your database. Actually, you only need one - WP-Optimize. It's really easy to use, and if you don't want to go through the features manually, you can just use the default settings.
Caching. The final trick when it comes to load time optimization is a thing called caching. This is a practice of fetching your site's content from the cache memory instead of generating it on the fly using the database. I know that this sounds like some technical jargon, but what it actually means is big improvement in load times.
The leading plugin that does this is called W3 Total Cache. It's a really complex piece of engineering, but what's great about it is that it's perfectly operational with its default settings, so you don't have to spend time learning how it works.
Additional, not obvious optimizations
Sometimes, speed optimization should be done even outside of your landing page, so to speak.
For instance, in case you're promoting your own products instead of focusing on being an affiliate, I encourage you to take a look into your payment processing service and the time it takes to send your prospective customer over to the payment forms.
The thing is that even if your landing page is the fastest one on this side of Mississippi, this won't mean a thing if your payment processor fails to load their page quickly enough.
The harsh reality is that when a visitor clicks your buy button and nothing happens for a while then most of the time they won't give it a second try ... you'll lose the sale.
Payment processing is simply this one thing you really don't want failing, and actually can't afford to fail.
Reduce the number of elements
Finally, I want to end this post with an advice that might seem obvious, yet it will do wonders for you both on the load time level and on the conversion level. This advice is to use a minimum of elements on your landing page.
Most website management platforms of today, including WordPress, make it really simple to create things like menus, content boxes, image boxes, massive headers and footers, but this has a seriously bad impact on your landing page.
First of all, the more elements there are, the more time it'll take to load them all. Secondly, if there's simply too much stuff on your landing page, the visitor can get distracted and not take the desired action. This might not even be such a big deal with organic traffic, but for PPC it is a serious one.
That's it for my load time optimization guidelines. Feel free to ask me anything. Do you have some specific approach of your own you'd like to share about improving site speed?
Author Bio:
This guest post is written by Robin, an expert specializing in helping people with their websites.
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