In today’s fast-paced digital society, timing is everything. It doesn’t make a difference if you have the most difficult and good website if it takes a long to load.
There are many potential causes for slow page load times, but I hope to provide you with some actionable advice today that will help you fix the problem and provide a better user experience.
Why Is Page Speed Important?
According to studies, users have a short attention span, with a lapse occurring anywhere from 0.3 to 3 seconds after the stimulus is removed. The longer it takes for users to access these pages, the more likely they are to abandon your website.
Websites that load more quickly benefit from fewer user abandonments, more successful sales pitches, better placement in search engine results pages, and, of course, a more positive user experience.
It’s a fact that users will abandon brands associated with businesses whose websites load slowly. Improving your site’s loading speed, however, will have a positive impact on new visitors, returning visitors, and revenue.
What Affects Site Speed?
There could be a few things slowing down the loading time of your site. Potential causes include, but are not limited to:
- Heavy CSS and JavaScript use
- Poor server/hosting plan
- Large image sizes
- Not using browser cache
- Too many widgets and plugins
- Hotlinking images and other resources from slow servers
- Traffic volume
- Older browsers
- Slow network connection (mobile devices)
That leaves a wide variety of options for improving page speed, which I’ll go over in more detail below. You should check your page load time before beginning troubleshooting to enhance website performance.
The key website performance metrics that can optimise your site and improve user experience include page speed, which we discuss in greater detail in our blog post.
How to Measure Website Speed?
It is crucial to take measurements before making any adjustments. You can tell if your adjustments are helping by comparing the site’s performance before and after you made it live with the help of specific metrics. Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift are three of the most important metrics you can track as a website owner.
What Is a Good Website Speed?
According to studies, users have a short attention span, with a lapse occurring anywhere from 0.3 to 3 seconds after the stimulus is removed. That means you need to have content ready to show the user in under three seconds.
Best Practices to Speed Up Your Website
It’s clear that many variables affect the time it takes for a page on your website to load. However, there is an equal number of methods by which you can enhance your website’s functionality. Here are some of them:
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of servers located in different parts of the world that work together to serve users’ requests for web content, regardless of where they happen to be located. When a website is hosted on a single server, requests from all users are routed to the same computer. This means that it takes longer to complete each request. And when users are geographically separated from the server, the load time lengthens even further.
Optimize the size of images on your website
Everybody enjoys taking in a good-looking picture. For online stores to succeed, pictures are a crucial component. Including lots of visual content (photos, images, and graphics) on product pages tends to increase their popularity and conversion rates. One drawback of using images is that they are typically very large files that cause a site’s load time to increase.
Compressing images with programmes like ImageOptim, JPEGmini, or Kraken is the best way to lessen their file size without lowering image quality. The process could be time-consuming, but it’s well worth it in the end.
Simplify your plugin setup.
Plugins are a standard part of any online platform. They implement user requests for new features. The more plugins that are used, the more system resources they consume. It causes the site to run more slowly and can expose security flaws. The number of plugins available grows over time, and some of them may become obsolete. It is suggested that you inspect all of the plugins you have set up and remove any that aren’t needed.
Minimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files
If your website contains a lot of JavaScript and CSS files, it leads to a large number of HTTP requests when your website visitors want to access particular files. Each request has to be processed separately by the visitor’s browser, which slows everything down. Your website will load faster once you cut down on the number of JavaScript and CSS files used. In an ideal world, you would consolidate all of your JavaScript and CSS files into a single folder.
Use website caching
If many people are trying to access the page at once, the server may take longer to load the page and then send it to each visitor. Simply put, caching is the act of saving the currently displayed version of your website on the hosting server so that it can be displayed again until the website is updated. What this means is that the page doesn’t have to be rendered again and again for each user. Web pages that have been cached eliminate the need for frequent database queries.
Reduce the use of web fonts
Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to design a website without using web fonts. Unfortunately, the use of web fonts has a negative impact on the speed of page rendering. Extra HTTP requests to external resources are made when using web fonts. Here are some things you can do to lessen the load time of your web fonts:
- Use modern formats WOFF2 for modern browsers;
- Include only those character sets that are used on the site;
- Choose only the needed styles
Conclusion:
The average person’s patience for waiting for a web page to load has reached a new low at around three seconds. There will be a precipitous drop in traffic and revenue unless this point is reached.
Therefore, it is suggested to use a simple method to increase your site speed: In order to improve your website’s effectiveness, it’s important to double-check and evaluate key metrics like conversion, traffic, and user experience.
To determine which pages and features most need updating, you should run a speed test on your current website and use the results to rank them. Start with the slowest parts of your website and concentrate on the pages that are most important to your conversion rates.