Improve Your Website Load Times
How important are website load times? You’ve got a gorgeous website. It contains all the information you think visitors will need.
It’s even got some vibrant animations and eye-popping typographic tricks. You’ve followed all the latest website trends. Does it matter if the website loading speed is a bit slow?
The simple answer is yes. Yes, website load times matter a lot. The following statistics speak for themselves:
- Want your website to appear in Google search results? Well the average loading speed for sites that do is just 1.65 seconds
- If a website takes more than 5.7 seconds to load the conversion rate (i.e. visitors becoming customers) drops under 0.6%
- An increase in the loading time of a site from one second to three seconds increases the bounce rate (the number of people clicking away from the site) by 32%
In other words, your website loading speed will have a direct impact on your bottom line. That means you have to do two things:
- Test your website load time
- Make adjustments to increase the loading speed
How to test web loading times
The quick answer to this is to open your website on a range of devices and see how long it takes to load. Put yourself in the feet of an average user. Would you put up with these website load speeds?
This will give you a rough idea, but that’s as far as it goes. For a more detailed analysis you can check your site using tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom. As well as performing a website speed test, they’ll let you see how long individual files take to load. This will make it easier to optimise for faster loading in the future.
Adjustments to make
So, you’ve decided that your website loading speed is too slow. What next? What follows are a few relatively simple steps you can take to speed up the loading time of your site.
As well as improving the user experience and driving your site higher up search engine rankings, a fast loading speed will make your site more accessible – as we explained in our blog on accessible websites.
Compress any images
High quality images help to make your site look appealing. The downside is, the better the images, the longer they take to load. The good news is that you can compress images without sacrificing quality.
Use tools like EWWW Image Optimizer, TinyPNG and ImageOptim to keep the visual but lose the lag. If you’re using SVG files for icons, compress them with SVGOMG.
Minimise the code
If you’re not a web developer, then you may not understand that much about the code developers use to build your site.
Take it from us, each part of that code – especially the spaces, breaks and commas between the details – can slow down loading.
Without going into too much detail, you can minify the code – combining files, shortening patterns, minimising spaces – and not impact the working of the website. Once again, there are some tools for that:
Above the fold
What is above the fold? It refers to the content user see before they start scrolling down the page. Make sure that this content loads first, which will create the impression of a great website loading speed even if the rest of the site is still loading ‘below the fold’. Techniques like ‘lazy loading’ can delay loading images and videos until they actually need to be seen.
Analyse plug-ins
A website based around a CMS like WordPress is likely to feature a number of plug-ins added for functionality.
The bad news is that plug-ins, while useful, can also slow down website load times. Go through your plug-ins on a regular basis, deleting or removing those which aren’t really needed. Alternatively, look for ‘smaller’ alternatives to the plug-ins you need.
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
The internet means that any business or organisation can work on a global basis. The problem is that if all of the content of your site is stored on servers in the UK, a visitor in the US, for example, is going to find it takes too long to load.
The answer? A CDN. This involves servers all round the world storing ‘copies’ some parts of the site, such as images and JavaScript files. When a user logs on, the content is downloaded from the nearest server, speeding up the process.
Key takeaways
Hopefully we’ve convinced you that website load times are incredibly important. If you want to speed up your load times and boost user engagement and conversions, then the tips we highlighted are:
- Test the speed so you know what you’re dealing with
- Compress your images without reducing the quality
- Minimise the code used to build the site
- Concentrate on content above the fold
- Keep a close eye on the plug-ins you use
- Make use of a CDN
And one more – don’t sit back and relax, but keep monitoring your website loading speed to make sure you stay ahead of the game.