Why is website speed so important? Well, speed has become a measure of online success these days as many online businesses vie for their share of the pie through the internet. The question now is: How do you get your website up there and remain competitive? Keep reading to find out.
What Is Page Speed?
Page speed is the length of time that the browser takes to display the first batch of information to the end-user. In other words, the time that it takes for you to see what is on the page.
When someone is browsing a web site for the first time, they are likely to be amazed by the speed with which a typical Internet connection allows information to be conveyed on the Internet. In fact, today’s average web page can deliver quite a few images, graphics, text, and other forms of information to a customer’s computer at the same time that it takes only a few seconds for the connection to download all of this data. How can a website ever be called ‘speedy’?
This question may seem difficult to answer, but in actuality, there are several answers to it. The most important factor that determines the actual site speed, in comparison with the search engines, is actually the ‘download speed.’ Search engines look at how quickly a page can be downloaded, and, as a result, they assign a certain value known as the site speed score. If a site is downloaded slowly, the search engines will rank it accordingly. Obviously, if a business owner wants their website to rank high on a search engine, they need to make sure that their web page is as fast as possible.
There are many factors in page speed, including loading time, page size, time to first byte (TTFB), and round trip time (RTT). All of these speed metrics can be adjusted so that your website pages load as fast as possible.
What is a good page Speed?
Keep in mind that the page speed will vary depending on the type of website and page content. An e-commerce website with lots of HTML code, CSS, JavaScript files, images, and videos will load slower than a blog article with text and 2 or 3 images.
Google pagespeed insight is also measured separately on desktop vs. mobile devices due to the different technology types. Mobile users will usually experience a slower load time than desktops. At 2DaMax Marketing, our web design experts shoot for optimizing page speed to 1-2 seconds for our clients.
Why Page Speed Matters
When a website loads quickly, the business creates a better user experience and increases conversion rates from various traffic sources.
According to Kissmetrics, if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, about 1/4 of consumers will click away, which can increase your website’s bounce rates and loss of engagement.
Your website’s page speed is a ranking factor that can affect your search ranking on popular search engines like Google or Bing.
Page Speed Affected By Load Time
What exactly does ‘load time’ mean? Page load time is the amount of time it takes to display all of the web page content onto the browser window measured in seconds.
In reality, page load times don’t matter all that much. What does matter is your ability to deliver the content to your visitor so that they can start enjoying the goods you have to offer them, which is known as response time.
Better Response Time
Response time is the time that it takes for a user to receive a response from the server. There are multiple parts, including DNS lookup, connection time, redirect time, first byte, and last byte. Response time is also known as the time to first byte (TTFB).
The faster you deliver this information to the user, the better chance you have of making a sale and see an increase in conversion. And the quicker you deliver this information, the better chance you have of beating your competitor who has to wait on his or her page to load constantly!
Obviously, the faster a page loads, the faster the response time is as well. So let’s take a look at how to improve your website’s overall load time speed.
How To Improve Page Load Time
Here are some things you can do to improve the speed of your page’s loading process. The most common ways to improve load time includes…
- File Compression – Reduce the size of images, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript
- Reducing redirects – Try not to redirect your pages as much as possible since they create additional time for the request-response cycle to complete.
- Minification – This type of optimization removes unused code, white spaces, and comments. Some plugins can provide minification for your website.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN) – Serves your web pages faster to visitors regardless of geographical location.
A well-optimized website will reduce the page size by getting rid of page builders, unnecessary plugins, and cleaner code. But as a webmaster, there are only a few metrics that are in your full control.
In this article, we will go over some of the things you can do right now to improve your page speed.
- File compression (specifical images)
- Why it’s so important to choose a quality web hosting company.
- Using a content delivery network (CDN)
- Browser caching for better speed and performance metric
Page compression can be done using plugins that can help reduce the size of CSS, HTML, and Javascript.
Reducing Image Sizes For Better Speed & Performance
Large images will slow down your page speed. By decreasing their size, your page will load up to 45% faster. The most common compression methods are lossy and lossless. Lossy will reduce the most amount file size but can degrade the quality of the image. Lossless will have less reduction but will maintain the best quality.
Some tools, such as Shortpixel, also provide a third option. Glossy will reduce the image size significantly compared to lossless but will maintain great quality. Most business owners can get away with using lossy compression. Still, websites that rely on their image qualities such as e-commerce stores and photographers will want to use glossy or lossless compression.
How To Do Image Optimization
First, make sure your images are optimized for the web. For your existing images, you can use a plugin to reduce the overall size without affecting visibility. But for new images, we recommend optimizing each image before uploading it to the page. This can be done by using tools like photoshop and Shortpixel.
Resizing your images to scale is also vital to page speed. This can be done by inspecting the maximum size required and using online tools to resize the image—no need to use a 5000px image when the area is only 800px.
Choosing the best format can also help with image optimization. JPEG and PNG are the recommended format for most images. Vector images can also be used whenever possible. Other formats such as JPEG XR and WebP can provide a better performance, but all browsers do not support them at this time.
Another great way to improve your website speed is to use a cache plugin for your images. These will ensure that they are available once the page has fully loaded. Not only is this great for increasing your loading speed, but it also reduces your need to re-fetch images, which can be quite costly. It is often these small savings that really add up when you are delivering your web pages.
Choosing A Quality Hosting Provider
When choosing a web hosting service, a business owner needs to be aware of a host of factors that will bring a poor performance of the webserver. A web host needs to satisfy some fundamental requirements of hosting. Each web host will come up with a host of different features and put up many different plans. You need to cut through all these competing offers and concentrate only on the most important aspects. Choosing a high-quality web hosting provider is never difficult if you understand what to compare and assess.
Most hosting providers offer different options, including
- Shared Hosting – This is the cheapest option, but traffic spikes can impact your website because you share the server with many other sites. It’s like living in an apartment complex sharing utilities with other families.
- VPS Hosting – This is the most common option for small business websites. You still share the server with a few other sites, but your website will have dedicated resources. It’s like living in a fourplex or a condo.
- Dedicated Servers – This is the most expensive option and used by large corporations. Dedicated servers provide a lot more space and resources available. It’s like living in a single-family home.
For those looking to choose a low-cost web hosting provider, choosing a company that offers a low price for the service itself is recommended. Although it may be tempting to go for the cheapest plans available, this is rarely a good idea as the hosting companies can save themselves costs by running the servers at lower speeds. For business websites with many pages, a faster speed is essential so that pages can be loaded more quickly and visitors can experience a better browsing experience.
There are a host of inexpensive hosting providers that provide excellent customer service. These companies may also offer some discounts and may offer some special deals to new signups. However, if you want to use their services, you will have to ensure that their services meet all your requirements. Cheap hosting providers will offer performance bottlenecks. You will not get the quality that you require. Therefore, it is important to compare different hosting providers to get the best hosting providers.
When choosing a web hosting provider, you will also need to consider whether the hosting provider will charge you for unlimited domains and email addresses or not. Many of the cheap web hosting providers do not allow you to buy additional storage space and bandwidth. Therefore, if you need extra storage space and bandwidth, you will need to find a different provider.
Finally, when choosing a quality hosting provider, you will also need to consider security features. As many people use the internet for shopping and emailing, you will want to ensure that your website is secure. You will have to ensure that the webserver used by the hosting provider is protected and running smoothly. Moreover, you will also need to know whether they offer any guarantee for uptime. With this information, you should choose a reputable hosting provider that meets all your needs.
Using A Content Delivery Network
A powerful way to increase website speed and minimize bandwidth consumption is to utilize a content delivery network. A CDN will make sure that fast deployment of your dynamic content (style sheets, images, JavaScript, flash movies, etc.) from any location near your visitor is guaranteed by efficiently delivering it to their remote servers via a high-speed broadband connection. With the help of the right content delivery network, your web pages will load in a flash faster than they do on other websites.
One way this works is by identifying the appropriate point at which to place the servers located. When a visitor views your website, the search engine determines where to send the requested page because it has to download the requested information from the servers. If your content delivery network’s connection speed is slow, it will take more time for the pages to be downloaded and the visitor’s overall experience to be affected. Later on, when your website visitors come back, they may not have all the files they requested. This can also cause delays in other operations, including application loading and start-up.
One method used to improve the connection speed in a site is through the use of Cloudflare. If you are using a content delivery network, such as a cloud services provider, it will be able to handle requests from many different users simultaneously, improving your website’s performance. However, Cloudflare has some disadvantages. Cloudflare’s pricing model charges on a per-gigabyte basis. It can be very costly if you start using Cloudflare on a large scale. If you don’t need to host large amounts of data, you may find it better to host your pages on your own server instead of using a cloud services provider.
If you’re not using a content delivery network, your web pages load more slowly and take longer to download because of slower upload speeds. When a user comes to your site, he has to wait for more than 10 seconds to get the information he wants. If your website content distribution provider delivers the requested pages fast enough, users won’t mind waiting a few more seconds for the information. With Cloudflare, this scenario won’t happen because your content delivery network is used by more than one website.
Cloudflare offers several plans that will suit your needs and budget. You can either pay for an annual plan or a monthly plan with a zero start-up cost. The cost is very affordable, especially when you compare it to other delivery mediums like radio, print, or yellow pages. You can also test your content delivery network’s speed to see how fast your web pages load. The results will show you the results you want to adjust your plans based on the results.
Enabling Browser Caching
Using a high-quality cache plugin for WordPress is an important factor when optimizing your website. A poorly written plugin can introduce delays and loss of information from your database resulting in slower visitors’ performance. A poorly written cache plugin will also cause security issues if your site contains sensitive information. Security is an ever-evolving field. Content management systems can be vulnerable to hackers that can attack and locate your server, which allows them to access your personal information such as your blog’s posts and email address. By utilizing a high-quality cache plugin, you can eliminate these problems while still delivering top-notch performance.
Using a quality cache plugin for WordPress is not difficult. One of the easiest ways to get started is by installing one of the popular plugins available. All of the top-notch professional quality plugins have been designed with WordPress by the leading software engineers. This means that every feature that you need to optimize your site has been crafted carefully with the most current knowledge necessary to allow your WordPress site to run at its best.
There are many other factors involved when optimizing your site for high performance, including using a cache to reduce server-side network activity and disk space usage. By minimizing the time spent per request by utilizing a cache, you will be able to make your pages load more quickly.
Popular plugins also reduce the need to wait for new files to be uploaded into your cache, as this feature will minimize the amount of time during a single request. This is important when you consider that most requests made to the WordPress server are extremely fast, and the ability to reduce the amount of time spent per request will help you have a speedy website.
When choosing a reliable source for your software, make sure that it will work with all WordPress versions. Many WordPress users update their plugin lists to the latest versions available in the WordPress core. If your chosen plugin does not work with the latest version of WordPress, it will not do you any good. Your website visitors need to be able to make their site feel intuitive and smooth to the end-user. A reliable source should offer an extensive list of supported plugins for all WordPress versions and make sure that they work with your database.
Finding a high-quality cache plugin for WordPress can be a challenging task. With the wide range of products available, it can be difficult to know which one will best meet your needs. The best way to find out is to read product reviews, look at product comparisons, and visit reputable sites. Be sure to choose a cache plugin that offers comprehensive customer support and works with all current WordPress versions. By doing your homework, you will find the best cache for your site.
Conclusion
Why Website Speed Matters is important not just for your visitors but for your search engine ranking, faster speeds will enable you to rank higher on Google, which means more visitors to your website. You could even convert some of them to sales if you make sure your site is always fast. It really does make a difference, and with a little effort on your part, you could see significant improvements in your website speed very soon.
You can get an easy to read website page speed report that will give you important insights to see how your website performs. If you are looking for a digital marketing agency that can improve your website speed, contact us today.
