Why Page Speed Is Important?
by Alchemy Interactive Digital Marketing AgencyIn today’s time, site speed
is far more important than ever. Needless to say, it is presently one of the
most critical aspects of every marketing strategy. Not only does it affect SEO
rankings, but contributes remarkably to user experience and conversions on the
whole.
Websites with low speed are
often seen to have low conversion rates, low page visits and high bounce rates.
Slow website means people will bounce off quickly as in today’s fast-paced
world no one has enough patience to wait for a webpage to load. Before we
discuss its importance any further, let’s us first see what exactly page speed
is.
What is
Page Speed?
Often confused with site speed, page speed is the
speed of a particular page on a website. It can be defined as either the time
taken by a browser to obtain the first byte from a web server or the time a
page takes to display all of its content. Google’s Page Speed Insights is a great tool to analyse your page
speed.
Why Does
Site Load Time Matter?
Everyone likes a page that loads quickly and we all
would agree to the fact that pages that load slowly are annoying. While page
speed matters a lot to website users, it is important to know how slow is
actually slow. Let’s understand this with some data.
A 2018 study by Google revealed that more than 50% of
mobile device users leave a website, which takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Interestingly, the same study depicted that on an average, mobile websites take
nearly 15 seconds to load. Another study by MachMetrics showed that most of the
websites take somewhere around 8-11 seconds to load. Although it might not
appear too long, the truth is that with every second of delay, you lose
customers or visitors.
This also affects
conversion rates. For instance, Walmart revealed in a report that with
every second of enhanced page speed, they observed an increase in conversion rate
by 2%. In view of the role of page speed in ensuring a great user experience,
Google had introduced new speed algorithm in 2018, making page speed an important
factor for every website owner and marketer.
Thankfully, boosting page speed is quite possible. In
fact, it’s not a tough problem to solve. What all you need is to find out why
your website pages are loading slowly and how you can improve things to enhance
their speed.
How to Speed
Up Your Website?
Here are some ways to improve your page speed.
· Optimize Images: Make sure the images on your web pages are of the specified size and
format. In general, PNG files are great for graphics with less than 16 colours,
whereas while JPEG images are perfect for photographs. Also, check if they are
appropriately compressed for the web.
Make use of CSS sprites to develop a
template for the images that you use quite often on your website, like icons
and buttons. CSS sprites club all your frequently-used images into one large
image that loads in one go, which leads to fewer HTTP requests. It then shows
you only the parts that you want to display on your website. This helps reduce
page load time by not making users to wait for several images to load
successively.
· Make Use of Content Distribution
Network: Also known as content delivery networks,
content distribution networks (CDNs) are the networks of servers that help distribute
the load of content on a website. Basically, copies of your website are stored
at several data centres at geographically different locations, so that website
visitors can access your web pages fast and easily.
· Take Advantage of Browser Caching: Web browsers cache too many types of information, such as images, style
sheets, JavaScript files, and so on. This way browsers don’t have to reload the
entire page when a user revisits your website. Tools like YSlow allow you to
check whether your cache expiration date has already been set or not. Once you
know this, you can adjust your “expires” header to how long you want the
information to remain in the cache.
· Boost Server Response Time: Factors like amount of
traffic your website receives, the server you use, kind of web hosting solution
you have for your website, and the applications your server uses affect your
server response time. To enhance your server response time, identify
performance hurdles, such as slow routing, slow database queries, absence of
ample memory and then, fix these issues. The optimum server response is within
200ms.
· Eliminate Render-Blocking JavaScript: Web browsers require creating a document object model (DOM) tree by HTML parsing prior to
rendering a page. If your web browser faces a script during this time, it needs
to cease and execute it before continuing further.
· Decrease Redirects: Visitors wait for a few extra seconds for the HTTP request-response
cycle to finish whenever a web page redirects to another page. For instance, in
case your mobile-specific redirect model is like: XYZ.com > www.XYZ.com >
m.XYZ.com > m.XYZ.com/home, then the two extra redirects will add up to the
total page load time, which will ultimately reduce page speed.
· Minify JavaScript, CSS & HTML: You can phenomenally increase your page speed by optimising your code.
This may include eliminating commas, spaces and other useless characters as
well as removing code comments, unused code and formatting. Google recommends HTMLMinifier for HTML, CSSNano for CSS and UglifyJS for JavaScript.
· Enable Compression: Use applications like Gzip to compress files and lower the size of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files
larger than 150 bytes. Remember not to use Gzip for image files. Rather,
compress them in tools like Adobe Photoshop as these programs let you have control
over image quality.
Tools to Check
How Fast Your Site Loads
Here are a few popular tools using which, you can
easily check the speed of your webpage:
· Page Speed Insight
· Pingdom
· GTmetrix
At Alchemy
Interactive, an award-winning digital marketing and web development company, we
pull out all the stops to ensure optimum page speed of your website. Whether
you are looking for developing a new website or want to optimise your existing
webpages, you can rely on us so that your digital presence doesn’t suffer due
to low page speed or other technical issues.
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Created on Aug 12th 2021 04:35. Viewed 529 times.