Working on your Website Speed and Loading Time

We’ve recently done some major work on a number of clients on their website speed and loading time – so what is the game plan here and why bother.

In days gone by the idea was to reduce the things you had on your pages to keep files small and downloadable, as certain ‘netiquette’ read that it was rude to force Internet Users to download a whopping 200MB movie on your home page.  But then Broadband arrived and everything speeded up again and people started creating larger and larger websites.  The Government even seem to have no compunction about downloading large documents as needed.

Then arrive Mobile and it’s much slower speeds and battery draining animations were once again frowned on, but it all makes complete sense.  Viewers of your website want it to load quick and get to the information they want efficiently.  Lots of studies exist citing headlines like ‘80% of users switch off if the page doesn’t download within 2 seconds’ and so on.

Google endorsed the whole speed issue when they came in on the side of the consumer and suggested faster websites would climb Google Rankings quicker.  What more can be said.

Correctly, the jury is out on the type of website you want or have, the idea being that you should be able to display those huge photos if that’s what you want.  But there is an advantage to making sure you respect your users and give them the quickest website you can.

Measuring

• Starting with industry standard PageSpeed Testing – you can quickly assess what improvements you can use to speed up your website.Interestingly, this does not measure the speed your website downloads at – but instead looks at the underlying technology your website uses and then suggests where you can improve things a bit.
• To see how long your website actually takes to download, PingDom has decent tool for measuring this.  Worth checking.

Targets

• Realistically what are decent targets, firstly consider your audience – are they wanting to download movies, or are they highly specialised niche market people.It matters because people looking for unique information will be considerably more forgiving if your website is a bit slow.  Also Google if they are doing their job right will know that your website is the best resource.

  However, if you are selling products to the general public then you want to make sure you have the fastest possible website.

  Be prepared to compare yourself with others.

• Load-time – 4 seconds and you probably want to speed this up, especially if many viewers are likely to use a Mobile.  2 seconds and you’re probably doing well.
• All pages not – just the home page – there’s little point in fixing the Homepage if the Product page is then really slow.

What Can You DO

• Content:
  • Images – Always resize image before you upload them to a website, get the file size to the smallest size you can – this pays off every time.
  • Plugins – try and avoid to many 3rd party ‘things’ – Twitter, Facebook and all that sort of thing – to much singing and dancing means long downloading.
  • Don’t play Videos automatically – YouTube actually don’t ‘count’ your video if it is played automatically there is no advantage to anyone if you do this.
• Technical Improvements
  There is a raft of technical improvements we can do to help you, from caching to database requests – it get technical, but the real key is to measure the improvements.

  Think of it this way – if you spend £200 making your website faster and as a result get a better Google Ranking, more visitors, happier customer, more sales – need I say more.  The simply situation is that it will almost certainly make financial sense to make a website faster.

Conclusion

There is a lot that can be done to make a website better for your Viewers, what this is about is not really ‘content’ or ‘driving more traffic’ – this is about giving the people that already use your website a better experience.  It can only be win win and that is why Google took the unusual step of publicly saying that a Faster website will rank higher on Google.

January 2020 – Update

It seems to me that this post is as relevant today as it ever was 5 years ago. Please see https://www.top10-websitehosting.co.uk/load-time-statistics for Stats based on Web Page Speed Loading Times.