Why is your page speed important?
The speed of your website is a crucial part of SEO ( you can learn a little more about SEO here ), and as more companies have to work virtually, optimization becomes more important than ever. This is also a fundamental part of your Digital Marketing strategy that you must take care of.
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53% of users abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. according to a study carried out by Google , with 3,700 anonymous data from Google Analytics.
Google has differentiated itself by putting users' needs
first. Therefore, they prioritize the fastest and best performing websites
What are the most important things to understand about your page speed and how can you improve it? Here we give you more details.
How to load a web page
To understand why a site can be slower, it is important to
know what happens when loading a website:
A user goes to a browser, enters your website, and generates
a DNS request.
These points to your domain name provider, for example digitalmarketinglahore.
Then it goes to your server or hosting where your files are.
The Document Object Model or DOM (" Document Object
Model " or "Object Model for Document Representation") begins to
load all your HTML, your CSS and your JavaScript. But very rarely, it extracts
all the necessary scripts or code necessary to render or load a web page.
Usually the DOM will need to request additional resources
from your server to make everything happen, and this is where your site can
slow down.
What could be slowing down your site?
The most common problems that can slow down a website are:
Large images: They are the biggest culprit of slow loading
web pages.
Hosting problems
Plugins, applications and widgets, basically any third party
script can also slow down the loading time.
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The theme and any large files can slow down the site.
The amount of hops or redirects required to access a web
page can slow down the loading process.
A website with large databases that are not properly
optimized
If you are using a content management system (CMS) like
WordPress, having too many plugins can cause your website to perform poorly in
speed.
Tools and resources related to page speed
These tools are the most recommended to analyze your page
and those of your competitors and that you can make the necessary changes to
improve:
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Chrome User Experience Report
This is the actual Chrome user metric . It's only available
for larger and more popular websites, unfortunately, but it does yield some
very good data. It is hosted by BigQuery , so some basic SQL knowledge is
required.
Lighthouse
Lighthouse is available from Chrome Dev Tools. If you're on
a web page and you click "Inspect Item" and open Chrome Dev Tools, in
the tab on the right where it says "Audit," you can run a Lighthouse
report directly in your browser.
Page Speed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is really cool. This tool will see how
your site is set up and will provide feedback accordingly and score it. It also
allows you to test the speed and performance of your mobile website.
Google TestMySite
In this tool, Google takes advantage of real-world metrics,
linking them to the percentage of people you are losing due to the slowness of
your site
Other very useful tools with Pingdom and GTmetrix .
Learn about digital marketing on Youtube - BTODigital
Site speed metrics
What are some of the metrics that you should analyze to know
the speed of your page and improve it?
First paint
First Paint is the first paint that is not blank on a
screen. It could be just the first pixel change. That initial change is
considered first painting.
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What is First Paint with content? This is when the first
content appears. This could be part of the browser or the search bar or
whatever.
What is significant First Paint ? It is when the primary
content is visible. When you get that "Yes, this is what I came to this
page for" reaction, that's the meaningful First Paint .
Time to interact
We've all been to a web page and it looks like it's ready,
but we can't use it yet. That's where this metric comes in. So how long does it
take for the page to be able to be used by the user?
DOM content loaded
It is when the HTML is fully loaded and parsed.
Ways to improve your page speed
There are many ways to improve the speed of your page and
give your users a positive experience:
HTTP / 2
HTTP / 2 can definitely speed things up. It is based on
SPDY, a protocol introduced in 2009 by Google with the intention of speeding up
the web. At that time there was talk of a 22-60% increase in the loading speed
of conventional websites and a 39-55% increase in the case of websites with
SSL.
Pre-connect, pre-fetch, pre-charge
Preconnection, prefetch, and preload are very important to
speed up a site. We see Google doing this on their SERPs. If you inspect an
item, you can see that Google pre-fetches some of the URLs so you can have it
faster if you click on some of those results. Similarly, you can do this on
your site. It helps to load and accelerate that process.
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Enable caching and use a content delivery network (CDN)
Caching is very important so you must make sure it is
configured correctly. Same with content delivery network or CDN
Compress images
The easiest and probably fastest way to speed up your site
is to compress the images. There are all kinds of free tools available to save
for the Web and compress properly.
Minify resources
Minification is the process of removing unnecessary
characters from code without changing the way it works.
These unnecessary characters are usually things like:
Characters in blanks
New line breaks
Comments
Block delimiters (square brackets)
Why should you speed up your website?
There are 3 fundamental aspects that should give you enough
reason to worry about the speed of your website. These are:
Usability: it is about allowing your users to have a more
intuitive and simple experience on the web. By having a site that takes too long
to load, users will go to another that allows them to navigate in an easier
way.
Google Ranking: As we already mentioned, Google gives
priority in its results to the sites that load faster. Being here is very
important as it increases your chances of conversion and sale.
Mobile device user experience : a Google survey indicates
that 61% of Smartphone users are more likely to go elsewhere if they cannot
find what they are looking for quickly. That means if your business site is
slow and not mobile friendly, this will not be a good experience and you may
lose sales and customers. This is why the user experience is increasingly
important.
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A negative user experience will not only cause you to lose a
customer or sale, it can also considerably affect the online reputation of your
brand , taking into account that, today, users go to the Internet to give their
opinion on everything they buy ( or try to buy). Bad references are popular and
the effort to clear your name can be more expensive than putting these optimizations
into practice.
As you can see, achieving an optimized site requires taking
care of several details and having some technical knowledge. In the
technological and digital world, it is very important to keep up to date and
know that new trends and tools designed for brands and businesses to make the
most of the advantages of the internet are constantly being born.
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