The Importance of Website Speed
Understanding Website Speed and Optimizing Your Page Load Times
Website speed is critical. Whatever kind of site you have, you want users to be able to access your pages as rapidly as possible. Once you understand website speed, you'll surely see the value in optimizing load times, either by your own efforts or by hiring a professional.
What is Website Speed?
Website speed is the time that it takes for your pages to load when someone accesses them. Some pages may load faster, and some slower, so website speed is a calculated average for a sample of page views on a given site. It is sometimes described as "time to first byte" to illustrate the length of time from when your browser requests the page until it gets the first byte of information from the server.
Why is Website Speed Important?
- User experience. Faster websites offer better user experience than slower ones.
- Profits. People are more likely to buy from faster sites.
- Engagement. Users will read and engage with content more if the site is fast.
- Search engines. It is easier for search engines to crawl and process faster sites, so your posts will take less time to show up in search results and will rank better.
What Can Happen if Your Website is Slow?
Turn Away Readers
Many readers will leave a site right away if a website is slow. They don't want to wait around to give a website a chance to load. 40% of people click away from a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. 53% of mobile users don't wait for a slow site.
It doesn't matter how beautiful your website looks or how much effort you put into the content if many people are missing out on it because it doesn't load quickly. Users may judge your entire brand by the performance of your website. Not only are you missing out on the user experience in this one instance, but you also take a chance of hurting your brand's reputation permanently.
Stress Out Users
Even if your most loyal or interested users continue to view your site, they are unlikely to have a relaxing or satisfying experience on a slow site. If your site takes a long time to load, you may be causing users an astonishing amount of stress.
The amount of stress caused by delays on mobile devices was akin to that of watching a horror movie. That's the last experience that you want your readers to have when they visit your website.
Lost Out on Search Engine Rankings
If you're like most people, you work hard to achieve ranking in search engines. After all, that's part of your point in producing content in the first place. However, if your website is slow, it can negatively affect your SEO.
Google judges slow websites for being inefficient because it needs to consume bandwidth and resources to navigate slow sites.
What Can Make Your Website Slow?
No Content Delivery Network (CDN). These servers are placed in geographic locations to help your sites load faster wherever they are accessed. Without them, sites may load more slowly in some places than others.
Theme and plugin baggage. Various processes put into places by your themes or plugins, like logs or transitions, can slow down pages over time.
Plugins. Plugins require a lot of energy to run. Lots of plugins or very bulky plugins will slow down your site.
No OPcache. OPcache speeds up how rapidly your coding language can load, which will speed up your page loading time as well.
Big media files. Large files load more slowly, and the more large media files you have, the longer it will take to load your site.
Script conflict. JavaScripts may interact with one another or with other site elements in a way that affects load times.
Bulky code. The more code that is used to build and run your site, the more code will need to be read each time the page opens, and the longer it will take.
Missing files. When files are missing, the browser struggles to find them, which slows down loading time and results in an error message.
Javascript isn't optimized. Javascript makes your website exciting, but if it isn't optimized correctly, it can delay your page loading time. Browsers have to completely load JavaScript files before opening the page, which results in slow load times.
How to Test Your Website Speed
Is your site slow? How slow is it? Testing your site for load times will tell you if your site is loading too slowly, some possible reasons for slow loading times, and what to do about it.
Here are some website testing tools that can do wonders for the speed of your site.
Pingdom
Pingdom monitors your site for uptime and performance with affordable plans that most businesses can consider. By using over 70 global polling locations, they continuously test and verify websites all day and all year.
They designed a website speed test to be user friendly but information-rich. While easy-to-use, this tool is powerful enough to optimize the performance of any site.
This is a powerful tool that will find how quickly your site loads, why it might be slow, and what to do to optimize your site for speed. They even offer a free website speed test. You can test your page in a variety of browsers, connection speeds, countries, devices, and more to make sure that it is thoroughly optimized everywhere.
GTMetrix offers summarized reports on why your page is slow to make it easy and clear for you to understand page loading issues. By tracking your performance over time, you can understand trends that may be affecting load time. You don't have to worry about monitoring your page's performance since you will be alerted if your page under performs.
GTMetrix
Google Pagespeed Insights
Google has a wide range of website analytics tools, so it should come as no surprise that they also have a robust page speed analyzer. Google Pagespeed Insights will give you a PageSpeed score and suggestions to help you improve.
They offer modules to automatically optimize your pages for speed. JavaScript libraries and other tools help you produce great content that doesn't hurt page load time.
What to Do to Improve Website Speed Optimization
Once you know your site isn't performing as well as possible, you'll surely want to do something about it. Solutions for a slow site are as diverse as the causes. Some are easier and some more challenging. Here are a few options for improving the speed of your site.
Reduce HTTP
HTTP requests are made for things like images, scripts, and stylesheets. The more of these requests need to be made, the longer the page will take to load. Google Chrome offers developer tools to help you see the number of HTTP requests on your site.
Look through them to see if any are unnecessary. You can also combine some files to reduce the number. CSS and JavaScript files can be merged when they are achieving similar functions.
Reduce Image Size
Un-optimized images, especially with large file sizes, use lots of server resources and consequently take a long time to load. By reducing the sizes of images, you save a lot of time.
If you have a lot of images on a page, consider reducing the number, linking out to a gallery, or reducing images to thumbnail size to reduce the number of large files that need to be processed.
Plugins
If your site is on WordPress, plugins like WP Rocket can make it very easy to automatically reduce HTTP requests and make your site faster. This plugin can combine files and remove unnecessary characters, or minify.
Minification removes formatting, new lines that aren't necessary, comments, and more to make your site as sleek as possible.
Change Themes
Some themes can negatively impact your speed. Just by switching themes, you can improve the load time of your site.
This can be an excellent way to make a big change without having to make lots of changes to coding and formatting manually. A sleeker, more minimalist theme can make a huge difference.
Improve Hosting
Sometimes your web host is the reason for slow performance. Improving hosting can speed up your site. Cheap servers often can't compete with the speed of large, efficient server networks.
The difference between load items of a website hosted on quality vs cheap servers is much larger than can be made up by minor tweaks in your site. If you need dramatic improvements and aren't seeing a difference with less drastic changes, a new host might be the right choice.
Eliminate Code
Eliminate any unnecessary code and combine code wherever possible to reduce load time. Get rid of extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation where possible.
Consider Getting a Website Expert
Optimizing your website load time isn't a one-time occurrence. You may have a large project of optimizing your entire site and making sure each page is loading as quickly as possible initially.
You'll also need to make sure that all of those pages remain optimized and that any new posts that are produced are optimized as well. Load time is important. You may not have the time to ensure that pages are loading quickly consistently.
It may be best to consider a professional website expert like Perfectly Optimized. We can help you create pages that load quickly and make sure that your existing site is performing at its best.