The main objective of effective web design is to give the user an enjoyable experience.
Site speed, or the time it takes for an individual webpage to load, is critical in determining if a visitor continues to interact with your site’ You only have one chance to entice them.
Most visitors to a web page now expect a page to load within a few seconds and if it doesn’t they will often leave your site to find one that does.
This is called your bounce rate and ultimately affects visitor numbers and your conversion rate.
As Google now uses a mobile-first policy, it is now more important than ever to make sure that pages are served quickly to those people using mobile devices.
WHAT GOOGLE IS LOOKING FOR
Google aims to offer the best user experience for all visitors which is why they use site speed as a ranking signal. A site that loads slowly will be penalised and not rank highly. This can have serious consequences for you as you will drop down dramatically in the rankings giving you lower visitor numbers and lower conversion rates.
factors that determine your page speed?
SERVER
IMAGE SIZE AND COMPRESSION
PAGE FILE SIZE
CACHING PLUGINS
Minify and combine code such as CSS and JS.
USE A CDN
TEST YOUR PAGE SPEED
The first thing you can do is test your own website to see how it is currently performing.
A good way to do this is to create a blank page and then test this for site speed. As this page will have no content then the site speed registered here will have the fastest site speed of your whole website. Any other page that you test on your website will have a lower site speed than the blank page.
By identifying and optimising issues that are slowing down the site speed on this page, then you will automatically improve all of your other pages’ performance.
Another thing you can do is visit Google’s Pagespeed Insights page. This tool will tell you what your page speeds are on both desktop and mobile and detail ways you can improve them.
Simply enter the page address that you would like to analyse. You are then given the results and suggestions on how to improve any poor results you may have.
For every second you shave off your web page load speed, you gain credibility, and your visitors begin trusting and gaining confidence in your business. Investing time in optimising your web page speed is therefore of prime importance.
As Google works on the “mobile-first” principle, you need to pay special attention to this area.
Several factors determine page speed, and in this article, we will discuss what these are and how you can dramatically improve your web page loading times.
Each of the tools we mention will give you ideas on how to speed up your site.
Images.
Images are the most likely cause of slow page speed. Each and every image on your site constitutes an HTTP requestIf your image file size is too big, this will slow the site when your browser tries to download the image.
We need speed-optimised versions of our images and this is done by compressing images.
There are two types of image optimisation:
1′ LOSSY – Removes pixels
2. LOSSLESS no pixel removal
With both these optimisation methods, we can strip out unnecessary metadata i.e. info regarding image size, colour properties, resolution, dates, etc.)
The ideal file size for images on websites is between 100-150kb but always aim at being below 200 kb. If you find that your images are a little larger than this when you have downloaded them, you can always use tools such as TINY PNG, SHORT PIXEL, and IMAGIFY to further reduce your file sizes.
It is also important to download your files in the correct format.
The Jpeg format is best for photos and png for graphics.
Aim to make your image file to be between 100-150 kb in size.
ENABLE BROWSER CACHING
A cache is an area on your computer that collects temporary data to help websites, browsers, and apps load faster. To help you achieve this, you can use a cache plugin that does all the work for you.
You should enable caching for your website. Every time a visitor comes to your website, they have to download ( through their web browser) the website’s elements before it loads. As long as these elements are stored in the cache, it means that it’ll speed up the process for anyone revisiting your website.
Fonts.
A little-known fact that small business owners are not aware of is the consequences that could arise by using certain fonts that you choose for your website. It is best to use fonts that are known as system fonts for your website – examples of these include Georgia, Impact or Arial. System fonts can be found on every device, and therefore a web browser does not need to do extra work in order to look for them. It is becoming more and more popular to use Google fonts as this enables you to increase the range of fonts that you can choose from. However, you will have to bear in mind that if you choose to use these then it is more than likely that this will slow your website down as it will need to connect to Google Fonts.
Your best option is to stick with system fonts if you can.
HOSTING
CHOOSE THE BEST HOSTING OPTION
It is important to choose the best hosting option for your website that you can afford.
REDUCE YOUR SERVER’s RESPONSE TIME
There are two options you can choose: either a Dedicated Server or VPS HOSTINg. As the name implies, a dedicated server is dedicated to your website only. This will ensure that you obtain the fastest speed possible.
The VPS hosting option means that you’ll share your website on a server that hosts many other websites. However, if you choose a reputable company, you will still be able to have a fast-loading website speed.
TEST YOUR PLUGINS
Every WordPress website consists of a theme and plugins, which are all made of codes -the more of them that you have will slow down your webpage.
If your web host is slow then the speed that your website loads will be obviously affected. This could be made even worse if your site is connecting to external sources such as Google Fonts, Google Maps and ReCaptcha. You will experience a time lag as you wait for your server to load all of these page elements.
INTERNAL ISSUES – WordPress Themes, WordPress plugins, page elements.
EXTERNAL ISSUES – Caching, web hosting, CDN
RUN COMPRESSION AUDIT
Need files as small as possible – GIDNETWORK ( GIDZIPTEST) This will tell you how many of your files are uncompressed. These services will compress your code to speed up your website. Your lines of code may, for example, have repeated, unnecessary code, and whitespace. These can all be compressed to speed up your website.
There are other ways to speed up your website, but font choice, image optimisation and using a caching plugin are three areas to start with. Always work with Google in mind, and remember that your customer is ultimately the most important person.
Improving your Page Speed.
There are many tools available that can give a speed
score – e.g. GTMETRIX. These sites scan your website page and give you ideas on how to increase your speed.
Most visitors to a web page now expect a page to load within a few seconds and if it doesn’t they will often leave your site to find one that does.
This is called your bounce rate and ultimately affects visitor numbers and your conversion rate.
As Google now uses a mobile-first policy, it is now more important than ever to make sure that pages are served quickly to those people using mobile devices.
WHAT GOOGLE IS LOOKING FOR
Google aims to offer the best user experience for all visitors which is why they use site speed as a ranking signal. A site that loads slowly will be penalised and not rank highly. This can have serious consequences for you as you will drop down dramatically in the rankings giving you lower visitor numbers and lower conversion rates.
factors that determine your page speed?
SERVER
IMAGE SIZE AND COMPRESSION
PAGE FILE SIZE
CACHING PLUGINS
Minify and combine code such as CSS and JS.
USE A CDN
TEST YOUR PAGE SPEED
The first thing you can do is test your own website to see how it is currently performing.
A good way to do this is to create a blank page and then test this for site speed. As this page will have no content then the site speed registered here will have the fastest site speed of your whole website. Any other page that you test on your website will have a lower site speed than the blank page.
By identifying and optimising issues that are slowing down the site speed on this page, then you will automatically improve all of your other pages’ performance.
Another thing you can do is visit Google’s Pagespeed Insights page. This tool will tell you what your page speeds are on both desktop and mobile and detail ways you can improve them.
Simply enter the page address that you would like to analyse. You are then given the results and suggestions on how to improve any poor results you may have.
For every second you shave off your web page load speed, you gain credibility, and your visitors begin trusting and gaining confidence in your business. Investing time in optimising your web page speed is therefore of prime importance.
As Google works on the “mobile-first” principle, you need to pay special attention to this area.
Several factors determine page speed, and in this article, we will discuss what these are and how you can dramatically improve your web page loading times.
Each of the tools we mention will give you ideas on how to speed up your site.