What is page speed, and how does it affect your online reputation?
Page speed is the length of time it takes for the content on a website’s page to load fully. Faster is better in a world where consumers have grown to demand instantaneous outcomes.
According to surveys conducted by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site’s page speed to be under two seconds, and they are more likely to abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.
But how long does it take for most websites to load?
The benchmarks for page load time that many people have been using derive from research by Geoff Kenyon, in which he compares website speed to the rest of the web:
- If your site loads in 5 seconds, it is faster than about 25% of the internet.
- If your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than about half of the internet.
- If your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than about 75% of the internet.
- If your website loads in 0.8 seconds, it is faster than 94% of other websites.
So, how can you tell if your website is up to par?
How to Calculate Page Speed and Score
Here’s how to see how well your website performs:
1. Go to the Site Speed reports in Google Analytics for your website. This will indicate how well your site has performed over time and the speed at which each of your pages loads.
2. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool to check the speed of your website. This will provide you with a report card on the speed of your website on mobile and desktop devices. The report includes some suggestions for how to increase the speed of your website.
3. Use Pingdom’s website speed test to see how fast your website is compared to the average of Pingdom’s tested websites.
4. GTMetrix will provide you with a detailed report on your site’s speed optimization.
Note: If you find different speed timing in Pingdom and Gtmetrix, don’t be alarmed. Pingdom will show you load time (the time it takes for your website to show the first result—this is what Google counts, and you should too), and GTmetrix will show you total load time (The time it takes to show a full page with its full functionality running).
It’s usually helpful to examine the speed waterfall from both tools for better comprehension.
What Is the Importance of Page Speed?
The purpose of page speed optimization and the strategies we’ll discuss later is to close the gap between user expectations (2 seconds) and average website load time (5 seconds). But why is page speed so important? There are three vital interrelated explanations behind this:
1. UX is harmed by speed.
We’ll start with the most significant reason for you to worry about website speed: user experience.
People no longer have patience for websites that take a long time to load—simply connecting to the internet used to necessitate a level of tolerance that no longer exists.
People are constantly online these days, and you have 3 seconds to display your page before they leave. More than three seconds generates a terrible user experience, and the threshold will continue to rise in the future.
2. SEO is influenced by speed.
The user experience drives the SEO consequences of site speed. While Google has been sluggish to announce whether slow websites will be penalized publicly, it looks that the time has come. You must ensure that your website is up to date.
3. Conversions are swayed by speed.
What should grab your attention is the impact of site speed on conversions. How do you get users to progress through your funnel if each step takes a long time? Your die-hard followers will do it, but newcomers who are prone to buyer’s remorse will back out.
4. Techniques for Increasing the Page Speed of Your Website
It’s not always easy to make your website load faster. If you have a small, light site, you may only need to implement a few strategies on this list.
Large, older sites with a lot of code and content, on the other hand, may necessitate considerable perseverance and the execution of some of the methods listed below.
Here’s Where You Should Begin:
Use browser caching: When you visit a website, your browser frequently caches pages to save load time.
When a user sees a webpage, browser caching saves the resource files to a local computer; therefore, employing browser caching is when you tell browsers how to handle their resources.
Things can slow down if your server’s response does not include caching headers or if resources are only cached for a brief period.
When you use caching, your pages will load significantly faster for return users and other pages that share the same resources.
This Is How You Do It
1. Optimize images: If your images load faster, your entire site will load faster. “…pictures generally account for the majority of the downloaded bytes on a page,” Google says. As a result, picture optimization can often result in significant byte savings and speed improvements.”
This means that if the photos on your pages can be optimized to minimize file size without sacrificing visual quality, you can see considerable benefits.
2. Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Minifying removes any characters that aren’t necessary for the code to run.
Code comments and formatting, deleting unneeded code, utilizing shorter variable and function names, and other duplicate data sources can all be eliminated.
3. Enable compression with gzip:
When someone visits your website, Gzip compression dramatically reduces the size of the files transmitted from your server. This will significantly expedite the process.
GTMetrix claims that
“The fact that CSS and HTML files include a lot of repeating text and a lot of whitespace is why gzip works so effectively in a web environment.” Because gzip compresses standard strings, pages and style sheets can be reduced by up to 70% in size!”
4. Shorten server response time: The amount of time it takes a web server to react to a request from a browser is known as server response time. This is a critical issue to fix since no matter how well-optimized your pages are for speed, they will display slowly if your server response time is slow.
According to Google, you should keep your server response time under 200 milliseconds. So, how do you go about accomplishing this?
5. Avoid landing page redirects: Having many redirects from the specified URL to the final landing page will cause your site to load slowly. This initiates a redirect loop, which takes time to complete.
Here are some examples of redirects that can cause delays:
- example.com → m.example.com/home – multi-roundtrip penalty for mobile users.
- example.com → www.example.com → m.example.com – very slow mobile experience.
6. Prioritize visible content: When additional network round trips are required to render the page’s above-the-fold information, Google’s PageSpeed tool will give you this message.
This “above the fold” material is what you see when you visit a desktop or mobile device page. So, prioritizing visible content means prioritizing things so that critical pieces on your page load first (and quickly) for users, while secondary page features like social sharing plugins, analytics javascript, and so on are deferred.
7. Remove render-blocking JavaScript and CSS from the content above the fold:
JavaScript and CSS resources frequently keep your page from loading until they are completely loaded. This is usually a brilliant idea because displaying your above-the-fold information too soon can be somewhat obnoxious.
However, this is regular notice you’ll receive from Google about site speed, and resolving it can significantly improve your page speed.
Conclusion
There you have it. Hopefully, you can see the benefit of having a speedy web page. It will not only make your customers happy, but it will also improve your online reputation.