The speed of your website creates an initial impression of your business. It’s vital to understand that the user experience can’t be redone. Slow website speed is one of the most aggravating factors that might push visitors away from your resource.
High-performance websites generate more repeat visits, have lower bounce rates, increase conversions and engagement, rank higher in organic search, and provide a better user experience. The websites that are developed and designed as per UX attracts more users.
Slow-loading websites impact user experience results, cost you money and harm your reputation. By decreasing the time it takes for a page to load, you can positively impact marketing and sales operations. You’ll increase traffic and attract more qualified leads who are more likely to become customers. We will advise in this article on how to optimize your website’s performance and page load speed.
What is page speed?
Page speed is a metric that indicates how quickly your page’s content loads. Many people confuse Page Speed Impacts, which is the average speed of a site’s page visits, with “site speed.”
The significance of website speed optimization
Page load time is a web performance metric that indicates the time required to display a page on the user’s screen. As we all know, SEO is important for websites and speed optimization is an important factor in SEO.
Consider how website speed improvement affects the following critical website success factors:
Conversion
Conversion is critical to the success of your business; it refers to getting your visitors to accomplish what you want them to do. They may purchase your goods, subscribe to your mailing campaigns, register for a webinar, or download a guide, for example.
The quicker a page loads, the higher the conversion rate. According to a Hubspot study, a one-second delay results in a 7% decrease in conversions. For example, a one-second delay on a page might lose Amazon $1.6 billion in annual revenue.
Visibility
Additionally, the load time of your website affects how easy users can find it. Google considers website speed when ranking sites. A low-performing website provides a bad user experience and, as a result, receives less search engine exposure. Since December 2017, Google has begun ranking pages depending on the basis of their mobile versions, even desktop searches. The purpose of this decision is to safeguard users against websites that perform poorly and are not responsive to all devices.
Usability
Customer loyalty is directly related to website usability factors like page speed, load time, and responsiveness to user demands. The more effectively your website performs, the happier a user will be. A positive user experience is critical for growing a large customer base and establishing a solid brand.
Impacts on Google Ranking
Website speed is a major factor that Google looks for because it ensures that users get the best of everything. Since 2010, Google has been using website speed as an important factor to rank websites. Furthermore, a faster web page responds quickly to user queries. According to Google, a web page must load in 3 seconds because a user gets bored if a website takes longer to open. The better the user experience, the higher is the Google ranking.
Important Website Metrics
Some important website metrics are load time, page size, time to first byte. Let’s understand these website metrics one by one.
1. Load time
The load time is the time taken by the website pages or the whole website to load. Loading speed increases if the web pages take time to load. Pages of the websites load on different HTTP requests and all the scripts and files load with it.
- Page Size:
A web page comprises many elements and different resources. When a page loads, it loads all those resources and files with it for its smooth functioning. Page size should be less, as per mobile users point of view because some might be using mobile data to load the page
- First Byte:
The time taken by the arrival of the first information by the server after you request the browser to display it. It is an essential website metric, and webpage loading must not take huge time as it may impact the SEO of the website. Web page loading speed is crucial as it gets counted into website performance. So, to rank your website in Google, you must take care of the website performance.
4. Round Trip Time:
The time a request takes to go to the server and come back to the device from which it was sent. In that time, it travels to the server and then comes back and shows up in your browser.
Factors that slows down your page speed
You have now seen the essential website metrics that impact the SEO and user experience. You want to make sure that your website does not lag anywhere. For this, you need to notice your website and ensure it loads quickly. Let’s look at the factors that slow down your website
- When you are using heavy images on your web page, it makes your page load slowly. On the other hand usage of optimised images makes your website lighter, and it can load easily.
- When you keep so many large files on the website, it affects the website speed.
- If you are rendering too many javascript files on your website, it will slow down. You must use a minimization tool to reduce the size of the files.
- CSS and JS codes that stay unused in the HTML are also responsible for increase in the page load time.
Why is page speed analysis important?
Page speed analysis is crucial to know how users interact with our website and what its speed is. You can take help from Google’s page speed Insights, as it clearly shows the web page’s speed score. Some people might overlook it, but it will be beneficial for the future in many aspects like better user experience, better SEO, huge traffic, and much more.
How can you increase your website speed?
Below are the following methods or ways using which you can reduce the website speed.
1. Eliminate redirects
Server will take time to find your page if it has more redirects. So, it is advised to limit the redirects to your website to let the server find the page correctly.
2. Minify your css and html files
Enable compression, try to minimise your site’s code. Ensure your code is easy to read and work. In this best website developers helps you or you can use the following tools to minify the sites such as:
- Ajax minifier used to minify CSS
- HTML minifier
- .YUI compressor
While writing the code, developers write code in comments, ensuring that these comments are removed because code comments and unused code also affects the website speed negatively.
3. Pre-connection, prefetching, and preloading
Preconnect, prefetch, and preload are all extraordinarily fascinating and critical components of site acceleration. Google demonstrates this behaviour in their SERPs. If you investigate an element, you can see Google prefetching some of the URLs to be available to you sooner if you click on one of the results. You may do the same thing with your website. It assists in loading and accelerates that process.
4. CDN (use Content Delivery Network)
CDN helps to speed up the web page load time. The content delivery network uses multiple servers to distribute the load of your website. What happens in CDN? The duplicate copies of your websites are stored in different data centers, and with this, your website gets fastly accessed.
5. Images should be compressed.
The simplest and most likely quickest solution to speed up your site today is to compress those photos. It’s a simple thing to accomplish. You can squeeze them using a variety of free software. Optimizilla is an example. You can even compress properly using free software on your computer, such as Save for Web. Saving the images in the right format also affects the website speed in a positive way. You can consider using JPEG or png files because these are compatible with all the browsers and can get compressed easily. If you are using HD images, you must compress them 60-80%.
Tip: Optimizing Web Images for SEO is a plus point.
6. Limit the plugin usage
Usage of many plugins on websites reduces the web page speed so keep minimum and only important elements. you can use such plugins that help you with image optimisation and minify the website code. So, it is up to you to determine which plugin will work to enhance the page speed.
7. Grasp browsing cache
Browsers store a lot of information like CSS, javascript, images, and many more. You must leverage the browser caching because when a user wants to return to your website, the browser does not reload the whole page. You can take help of the tools if you have an expiry date of your catch. You can better take the advantage by leveraging the browser cache
Conclusion
At the moment, the average user expects web pages to load in less than three seconds. If you fail to live up to this expectation, you will lose a significant amount of internet visitors and, as a result, money.
As a result, we recommend following a straightforward yet effective website performance optimization strategy:
1. Conduct a review and evaluation of the critical success elements for your website, taking conversion, visibility, and usability into account.
2. Conduct a performance test of your existing website and prioritize the pages and features that require the most improvement in light of these three variables.
3. Begin your optimization with the most time-consuming aspects and work your way up to the pages that are most critical to your conversion success.
Final thoughts, If you cannot wait for a website to load while browsing and surfing the internet, how can you expect visitors to wait till your website loads. Isn’t it kinda unfair! If even a single person comes back without waiting for your website to open, consider it a bounce.
With every single bounce, you lose your potential customers, your sale, and it can affect your business badly. You can hire the best design and development company in India to take care of Speed optimization. Mandy Web Design – A Web Solution provider optimises web speed so that you can’t lose your valuable customers just because of slow loading speed.
