By testing various live integration of the booking engine, I came across some hotels, where the booking link was loading slower than normal response of just 3-4 seconds.

As google indicates in one of their studies: ‘ The average time it takes to fully load the average mobile landing page is 22 seconds. However, research also indicates 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. ‘

So the goal is to keep the loading time of the booking page as low as possible. Our page is loading and responding within the 3 seconds, but I have seen some elements, as pictures are loading gradually. This has disturbed me as user and is not beneficial at all for the user experience. Therefore I studied the situation and analyzed it before and after optimizations.

BEFORE OPTIMIZATION

Measured with GTMetrix. Showing that was need 6.4s for the application to load fully.

AFTER OPTIMIZATION

b) Images size

BEFORE

Size 1.96 MB

Pixels 2.304 x 1728

AFTER

Size 101 KB
Pixels 600 x 450

There are in total 3 rooms for this properties and each rooms has 5 pictures. Therefore, we are talking about a total of 15 images, that were making the booking engine slower than normal.

Images have been optimized and reduced in size, so that loading time is lower. There is no need for such huge images as more than 2.000 pixels, as the frame used by cultbooking has maximum 600 pixels, when zooming in.

As recommendation we can have 600 pixels, also 700 or maximum 800 would be enough. Images have not lost quality and the proportions have been kept. So not, squizing has been done, objects do not look thinner than normal.

END RESULT

What does these optimizations mean for the end user? The following video shows how images load first with the bigger pictures, on slow mode and the second booking link is with optimized images, where the loading time is faster, at least with 1.5 seconds. So the 1.5 seconds make a whole difference nowadays:

NEW TEST

Also I made a new website speed test with other tool called pingdom.

The results are satisfactory after the optimization: 3.08 seconds for fully loading time.

IMPROVEMENTS

Our team is looking to optimize all the remaining properties that have room pictures too big and resize, compress the images. Also, I told the developers to create an automated tool on the server that automatically resizes the images to the required size.

Support & Help

For questions and help, you can reach us via the contact form or directly by email: info@cultbooking.com