Why is Website Speed Important?
Website speed is important because it can affect your ranking in Google but can also hurt conversion rates. Nearly half of all internet users will abandon a webpage that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, and 70% of people said they were less likely to purchase from a site that loads slower than their major competitors.
Website Load Time and Page Speed Explained in Detail
Website loading time is a crucial factor of the user experience. For this reason Google developed a tool (Lighthouse) that analyzes web pages and assigns a score for many UX related categories, Page Speed or Website Load Time being one of them.
Website performance optimization, or web performance optimization (WPO), is the process of improving the speed at which a website runs on a visitor’s browser. WPO can be divided into two categories: front-end and back-end optimization.
Front-end web performance optimization refers to the actions taken to improve load time as perceived by the visitor. Back-end web performance optimization refers to actions taken on the server side of a website to optimize its content delivery network (CDN) connection, database queries, and other resources that affect response time.
The following high-level areas are some factors that can affect website loading time:
– Page size: The larger the page size, the more data needs to be loaded, which takes more time.
– Server response time: The slower server response time, the longer it takes for a page to load on your site.
– Browser cache settings: If you have set browser cache settings to cache all or most of your pages
How to Improving Website Performance
Drilling down in the different areas of website performance there are many different reasons why performance is lacking. The following are some of the most occurring reasons and how to fix them:
1) Large images? Optimize images: Images make up the majority of the bytes on a webpage, so it’s important to optimize them to reduce their size without losing quality. You can use tools like Image Optimizer for WordPress or TinyPNG.
2) Large JavaScript and CSS files? Compress JavaScript and CSS files: This will reduce the number of requests that your browser needs to make, which will lead to faster loading times. You can do this by using tools like YUI Compressor or JSMinifier.
3) Slow loading page? Reduce server response time: The more quickly your server responds with data
How to Know What to Tackle First?
For this you will need a tool that analyzes your pages, keeps track of your progress and offers your detailed reports.
That’s where we come in. Even with our free plan you can get started testing your site and have all information available for you. You can have an overall view of your progress over time or you can open up individual page reports and see concrete tips on what can be improved.
Want to test this out and get started but don’t have an account yet? Create one, for free, today!