Investing in Bank Website Development: Beyond the Minute
Website load times are incredibly important for your credit union. On average, bank websites are slow to load and this will likely only become a bigger problem as banks continue to expand their digital offerings.
By investing in bank website development to improve load time, you can ensure that your community bank or credit union is making the best impression on your prospects and current users and giving them a positive online banking user experience.
Why Page Load Time Is Important
Acceptable website load times might be shorter than you think. How fast should a website load? More than 50 percent of website visitors abandon a page after waiting more than three seconds for it to load. If your website isn’t loading quickly, you’re losing customers. The trick is speeding up your web page loading time to retain and gain customers through fast online banking portals.
Oneupweb is here to help with recommendations based on data from real-world website analytics for credit unions and banks!
Improving the Online Banking User Experience for Credit Unions
Your customers need information on your website quickly for a variety of reasons. Imagine you are a customer urgently searching for a nearby ATM, ready to report an issue, needing to stop a check, looking for an account balance or searching for the proper phone number. The only thing keeping you from solving your urgent issue is that your credit union’s website or web pages are slow to load.
For so many, this quickly leads to abandoning the web page or experiencing increasing frustration while waiting. You can minimize customer frustration and complaints, letting your team focus on day-to-day operations rather than answering angry phone calls. Offering seamless credit union banking online services, from online deposits to credit applications, helps retain customers.
Slow loading times also impact revenue. For Amazon, one second of load time is the difference between making or losing $1.6 billion in sales per year. For banks, this may mean missing out on deposits, loan applications or other money-making operations. In some cases, it can mean losing valuable customer or commercial accounts.
How to Speed Up Web Page Loading Time
Speeding up your web page load time and focusing on user experience are the best ways to keep everyone happy and improve everyone’s overall experience on your page. The first step is keeping an eye on your website load time statistics through online checkers like Semrush or Google PageSpeed Insights. Once you identify page or site load time as an issue, call on our web development team to help implement solutions.
Here are four ways you can reduce your web page load time:
1. Minimize HTTP Requests
Eighty percent of a user’s waiting time is spent while the browser is downloading the various parts of the page such as images, text, scripts and more. Minimize HTTP requests (a user’s computer trying to access a site resource from a server) to shrink this waiting time. You can make this change either by simplifying your site design or by combining files into a single script to run faster.
2. Pre-Load or Post-Load the Page Components
These two may sound contradictory, but they both have separate goals. In pre-loading, you help components such as images and style scripts load while the browser is idle. This speeds up the loading process as you continue on the page.
Post-loading allows you to load the main pieces of information first, so your user can see that before the less important pieces load in. So, if your credit union customer were looking to log in to their account, the login box would be one of the first items you select to load to make it seem as if the site is loading faster.
3. Decrease Your Web Page Size
If your page is more than 0.5MB to load, the size could be severely impacting the loading time. Any area you can condense or take away to decrease your page size will ultimately reduce load time. This also includes your mobile web page optimization. Knowing the proper sizes for desktop and mobile is key to lowering load times on credit union websites.
4. Minify and Condense Your Content
Remove line breaks, extra spaces, characters and unnecessary code to speed up web page loading time. You can also condense your content with compressor services across your HTML and CSS codes. Ultimately, when you minify and compress your content, you are speeding up parsing, downloading and executing in order to improve your website performance.
Credit Union Website Development Help Is Here
Improving your credit union’s online banking user experience on your own can be difficult, but we’re here to make it easy. Let Oneupweb’s experienced bank marketers improve your load times and help your credit union with any other website development needs. Give us a call at 231.922.9977 or submit our online form to get started today.
