Website Speed

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Speed is a significant term in our life. Would you want your meal delayed at the restaurant? Would you enjoy waiting an extra hour for the singer to grace the stage when you attend a concert? Would you be OK with standing in the middle of the street looking at your watch as your date texts you he/she will be a little late? No, no, and no! And you certainly wouldn’t like to wait for a website to load a single picture for more than a couple of seconds, would you? We guessed so…

Yes, website speed is important, but of course, there is more to it than what we’ve said above. So, if you are ready, let’s dig a little deeper into this…

Why is Website Speed Important?

Actually, page speed is not just important, it is crucial for your online success, mainly for the following reasons:

Speed Can Make or Break User Experience

Internet users are not known for their patience- and why should they, honestly? We are living in a digital world, carrying small computers in our pockets with the ability to access any information within seconds, so unless they want to fondly remember the late 90s or early 2000s, no one really wants to wait for more than one or two seconds for a website to load.

Long story short, you may have the best content on the Internet on a specific subject, or you may be offering your customers a deal they would never want to refuse, but if your site takes more than two or three seconds to load, you already lost an important part of your visitors.

Speed Affects Your Search Engine Rankings

As we have mentioned in our detailed SEO guide, speed is a very important factor when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines. This means if your site scores low on that department, you shouldn’t expect it to rank really high. Google tries to offer the best websites to its users, and it certainly does not want to direct them to a site that cannot load a single web page without waiting for a few seconds.

Speed Has a Direct Impact on Conversions

After all, that’s all that matters, isn’t it? Conversions… Well, the bad news is, if your website is slow, you will be losing more conversions than you can actually afford. The reason? It’s basically a combination of the two above. Bad user experience plus low search performance can equal only one thing…

To back up what we have just said, here is a couple of statistics for you:

  • According to Google, bounce probability increases 32% as a webpage’s load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds.
  • According to Unbounce’s page speed report, almost 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their decision on whether to buy a product or not
  • Again, according to Portent’s data, when it comes to e-commerce, the highest conversion rates occur on pages that load between 0-2 seconds.

As you can clearly see, the digital world is more or less like the Wild West, it can be quite an unforgiving place for those who are not fast enough!

What Factors Affect Page Speed?

Page speed can be affected by a number of factors, which should be regularly checked. The main factors affecting your site’s speed are the following:

Hosting

Your hosting company -and the server it places your website on- has a direct impact on your site speed. As the wrong choice of hosting company/hosting plan will significantly affect your site’s performance, try to choose the right one for your needs, with the following considerations:

  • Server response time – Try to check independent data on your provider’s response time
  • Hardware – SSDs are faster than mechanical drives
  • Hosting plan- Shared hosting is obviously an affordable & practical solution, but it may lead to overcrowded servers, which will most likely lead to slower loading times for your site, if not worse!

Bad Coding

Coding is an art form in itself, that’s why different coders have different ways of writing code to perform the same tasks. If there are huge chunks of code on your website just to perform minor tasks, it will surely have a negative impact on your website speed. You -or your development crew- should take care of unnecessary code on the backend, and make sure it is as clean as possible, to get the best results.

Unnecessary JavaScript and CSS

Heavy usage of CSS and JavaScript to add more style and functionality to your site’s front end might lower its speed. This is especially the case with above-the-fold content, which means the first part of the screen users see when they open your site, before scrolling down. Moving the scripting to a below-the-fold area would be a good solution for this.

Too Many Plugins!

We get it, plugins are fun, easy to use, and quite helpful most of the time. But stuffing your site with them will sooner rather than later hurt your speed. The math is simple enough on this: The more plugins and widgets on your site, the longer it takes to load. Only use the plugins and widgets you really need, and try to get them from trusted sources, instead of installing the first one that looks like it can do the job.

Images

Most people don’t usually think about this, but images too play an important role in your page speed. If you have too many images on a page, or images with really large sizes, or -the worst!- both, your site will suffer. Don’t overuse the images, and try to optimize them -there are a lot of free online services/tools for this- so they don’t take up so much space. Speaking about multimedia, keep in mind that video and music files can also affect your site speed.

And on the user end, some of the main factors that affect site speed are;

  • Internet connection speed,
  • Browser,
  • PC Cache…

So if you are absolutely sure that there is no problem at all with your site speed, the problem might be related to some of the above on the user end. But no matter how fast you think your website is, be sure to check it regularly. More info on this below.

How to Measure Website Speed?

You would want to regularly measure your page speed, to make sure everything is OK.  There are a lot of free and trustable tools that you can use to check your website speed. Here are three of them:

  • Google’s PageSpeed Insights – just enter your website URL and view the detailed report!
  • Pingdom Tools – again, you enter your URL, and you can select a specific location to test it from!
  • GTmetrics  – another popular and powerful tool that lets you test your site speed for free.

Don’t forget to perform the test on different tools, and make sure to see how your website performs when tested with different locations.

7 Tips for Increasing Website Speed

Now that we know website speed matters and why it does matter, naturally, we would like to increase our site speed. But how? Well, there are a couple of solutions, some very easy, some a bit more complicated. Let’s have a quick look…

Here are 7 ways of speeding up your website for better user experience and SEO scores:

1- Use CDN

Using a CDN (content delivery network) will basically help you shorten the distance the data will have to travel between the end user and your website’s server.

2- Clean Your Library!

If you check your media library, chances are you are going to find a lot of old, unused images. Delete the unnecessary ones. Cleaning your media library will have a positive impact on your site speed.

3- Minimize HTTP Requests

HTTP requests are made for downloading different components of a web page. You can use Google’s Developer Tools to check out how many HTTP requests your website makes. Reducing their number will increase your website performance.

4- Reduce Your File Sizes!

You can use a tool to reduce the sizes of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, which will help with site speed. There are a lot of free tools for this available on the Internet.

5- Reduce the Number of Redirects

Each time one of your pages redirects to another page, users will have to wait in order for HTTP request-response cycle to complete. By reducing the number of redirects, you will be able to increase your website speed.

6- Use a Professional Page Speed Plugin

If you don’t have the technical knowledge to take care of each and every detail that might affect your page speed -which is perfectly understandable- you might want to opt for a professional page speed plugin, which will take care of a significant amount of problems on the backend for you. Try to choose a trustable plugin, and make sure you read a lot of independent user reviews before making your decision.

7- Enable Browser Caching

When a user visits a website, some elements of the page are stored on their hard drive in temporary storage, which means the next time they visit the same page, they won’t be needing to send HTTP requests to the server to reach page components. Enabling caching can save a lot of time for your returning visitors, and of course, increase the user experience. There are a lot of easy-to-use plugins that you can check out for this.

In addition to these, please don’t forget to make sure to go over the points that we have mentioned in the previous part, about the factors that affect your site’s speed, to get the ideal performance.

FAQ about Website Speed

Question: What is a good website speed?

Answer: A good website speed is one that loads quickly and reliably for visitors. It should be designed to handle a high volume of traffic without crashing or slowing down. A fast website speed is also important for search engine optimization (SEO) since it can impact your site’s ranking in search results. To improve your website speed, start by optimizing your images and code, using a content delivery network (CDN), and caching static content.

Question: Is there a Chrome website speed test extension?

Answer: Yes, there is a Chrome website speed test extension! Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more. You can install the Lighthouse extension from the Chrome Web Store. Once you’ve installed the extension, open up the page you want to test in Chrome. Then click on the Lighthouse icon next to the address bar. This will open up the Lighthouse panel. Click on Generate report. Lighthouse will run a number of tests against the page and then generate a report. The report will tell you what areas need improvement and how to fix them.

Conclusion

In the digital age, we are used to getting things faster and faster. Whether is it really a good thing or not, we leave that debate to philosophers- and as you know, there are a lot of them on the Internet! But, what we know is that people -especially the new generations- are used to getting things fast, and it is only understandable that they expect speed from you. So, in order to play the digital marketing game in this day, you better speed up your website, our you will surely get lost in the cloud of dust your competitors leave behind!

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