Why Page Speed is Important
Whirling circles. Annoying dots. Tortoise-speed progress bars.
Everyone hates buffering and loading.
In fact, we hate it so much that 79% of users who are dissatisfied with page performance are less likely to buy from a site.
(That’s absolutely massive.)
Page speed interrupts streams of consciousness and trains of thought that may otherwise have taken buyers straight to checkout, it gives them a shot of annoyance in an otherwise sunny day, it makes you look unprofessional…
But that’s not all.
Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. And John Meuller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, has defined the magic number as just two seconds. Any page that takes longer than that to load will be penalised by Google.
Why? Here’s the reasoning, straight from the search engine:
“We’re seeing an extremely high response-time for requests made to your site (at times, over 2 seconds to fetch a single URL). This has resulted in us severely limiting the number of URLs we’ll crawl from your site.” – Google
Put simply, the faster your site loads, the faster it’ll get to #1.
A slow page speed means that search engines are able to crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget (yes, apparently they have a budget). This means your indexation could be negatively affected – leaving you lagging behind the competition.
And all of this bad news is made 10 x worse when you look at it on mobile.
Mobile sites, in general, are badly lagging behind desktop sites in key engagement metrics such as pages per visit, average time spent on the site, and bounce rate. For retailers, this can be especially costly since 30% of all online shopping purchases now happen on mobile phones. The average U.S. retail mobile site loaded in 6.9 seconds in July 2016, but, according to the most recent data, 40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. And 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same site again.
Enough with the bad news! What can you do about it?
Well, the most important step to take is increasing your page load speed. First of all, you need to find out what it is (and how big a problem you’ve got). Heres how:
- Enter your website URL at PageSpeed Insights.
- Click Analyse.
- View your stats on desktop and mobile by clicking on the tabs.
Google will grade your website’s page speed, as well as its optimisation.
What’s your score? If it’s less than optimal, don’t panic – here’s what you can do to improve page load speed:
Compress
Reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes with GZip. Don’t use it on images – find out how to optimise those below.
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Clean up that code! Just removing spaces, commas, and other unneeded characters will do wonders for your page speed. Also remove code comments, formatting, and unused code. (There are tools if you don’t want to do it by hand.)
Check your cache
Browsers retain a lot of information on web pages so they don’t have to load the whole thing next time. Using a tool like YSlow, you can view the expiration date for your page’s cache – and if it’s anything less than a year, extend it (unless you’re the type who likes to change their template often).
Optimize images
Resize images to the maximum width they’ll display on the page, always use the best file format (PNGs are best for graphics with fewer than 16 colors and JPEGs are better for photographs) and ensure they’re compressed for the web.
Fiddly busywork, this is not. Getting into a good habit of optimising your sites now will pay off in the long run, and we’re not exaggerating when we say small improvements like this add up to a huge shift in user experience that will put you on the right side of history.
Have you followed our tips for a faster loading site? Or do you have any of your own to share? Let us know in the comments!
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Convertri’s pages load faster than any other on the web. Our app use clever compression, image optimisation and accelerated page technology to make sites load faster and boost your conversion rate… and it all happens when you hit Publish. No coding required.
Try us out here free for 14 days. After all, speed kills – so why lose sales?
