We all know what its like when you’re waiting for your website to load, you’re trying to purchase or checkout and your’e stuck with the spinning circle of death as your heart rate goes up hoping that the purchase has been made and then BANG – it times out.
Website page speed is so important for many reasons, firstly to your audience, if you are looking to convert your traffic then your page load needs to be quick to ensure your audience stay on your website or app and don’t get frustrated and bounce off. Also, and sometimes more importantly, Google will rank a faster website over your competitors as its ranking algorithm over the past few years has put a lot more emphasis on page speed.
So, with that being said – page speed is now an indicator of the overall picture of how clients interact with your website.
What is Page Speed?
Page speed is defined as the time it takes to display all of the content on a page of your website or how long the browser receives the information from the server the website files are stored on. Essentially your website host. This can be defined by the code of your website such as the HTML, CSS, Javascript, Images & PDF’s can all have a dramatic effect on your websites page speed. It’s so important that the code is clean, CSS and other code is merged where necessary to ensure the best performance for your website.
Why is Page Speed A Priority?
Well, there have been many studies on bounce rates and why people click off websites and apps, and the main reason is page speed. We are notoriously impatient and if your page doesn’t load, we generally become frustrated and click away and you’ll likely find your competitor will then win your business. Not good right? So, in order to ensure your website converts you need to make sure you build your website with best practices which we’ll go into more detail later on in this post.
Google will rank your website higher if your page speed is good, they have their own page speed test for you to analyse how Google sees your page speed, there are others such as GT Metrix, but you want to ensure your results are right with the Google test.
Heres a great video by Google on the subject.
So, now you know why page speed is important for your audience and for Google, we’ll go on to show some short tips on how to optimise your website and best practices when building your site.
Factors That Slow Your Website Down
Heavy images, if your images are not properly resized this will take longer for the server to load the files, you can cut out descriptions and other assets and if you are using WordPress there are plugins you can use such as Smush and Short Pixel.
Compress your files, code and merge CSS files and javascript files, this will help your browser load the web page much more quickly. If you have lots of unused code, get rid as it will only slow the load down further. Rendering too many javascript files will make your page load slowly too, so ensure you merge them where possible and get rid of any unused code here too. Generally put, if you have too many large files on a page it will slow your page down, so just keep that in mind when building.
Factors That Help With Page Loads
With this in mind, the opposite applies to the above, there are two markets we need to look at when optimising our page speed, 1 is desktop and 1 is mobile and both have their own needs and audience, for example with mobile you can use Accelerated Mobile Pages to help with your page speed or you can build independently to display less elements on your mobile than desktop so you can give your audience a streamlined version of your desktop offering. You can get to the point more and strip out heavy video files to ensure a better mobile experience.
Your desktop version still needs to be factored here, 25% will be visiting from a desktop, laptop etc so keep it quick by merging files, reducing image sizes, ensuring your server can handle the files, use a CDN where necessary to load from the users location and your desktop will index well.
Get your website in the green like ours
You can view the page results below and you can see where Google has identified issues and what is good – labelled in green.
Click here to view the results
So, to summarise, using the points above will help your audience engage better with your website, help convert website traffic and you’ll also help your website rank highly in Google so ensuring your page speed is good is critical for your online success.
If your website is not in the green and you need help with optimising then why not speak to a member of our team today for an informal chat about how we can help your business succeed online.