How fast a web page loads when a user accesses it is a very important factor in determining how the user interacts with the site subsequently. At the same time, modern day websites are loaded with modern day scripts and heavy images to make them look attractive and behave intuitively. Every site owner has to take a middle path of keeping the site attractive while ensuring it loads very fast.
What is site speed ?
When a customer goes to the restaurant, slow service from the waiter results in poor reviews and that creates bad impacts on the number of future customers. Similarly, slow site speed and performance can result in poor search engine rankings, overall site traffic, and negative user experience. According to Google, page speed is the key factor in the rankings of the search results in recent years. Unfortunately, according to its recent benchmark report findings, most of the sites and nowhere near that.
Website speed or website performance generally refers to how rapidly a browser loads the webpages for the given site. Slow loading sites can send users away. Conversely, sites that load rapidly will have more traffic and better conversion rate.
Why does site speed matter ?
Conversion rate:
If someone has the website, then the web speed matters much in the case of user interaction with it. In very rare cases, the site loads very slow due to the web hosting platform. Users will never like to wait. According to the research, 40% of the users bounce out of the page if the load time is more. Multiple studies have proved that site speed affects the conversion rate. Not only users prefer the fast loading sites but there are high chances users are being converted. Many companies already proved that decrease in even milliseconds for the page load will increase the conversions.
Let’s look at some great examples:
- Mobify found that decreasing homepage’s load time by 100 milliseconds resulted in a 1.11% uptick in session-based conversion.
- Retailer AutoAnything experienced a 12%-13% increase in sales after cutting page load time in half.
- Walmart discovered that improving page load time by one second increased conversions by 2%.
This is how site speed optimization and improvement results in higher conversion rate.
SEO best practices:
Site performance is a very essential factor in the google search engine rankings and the site performance on mobile devices are especially important for SEO.
User Experience:
The poor response time, and long time for the page loading create a bad user experience. Continuously waiting to load the page of content becomes very frustrating for users and may force them to leave the site.
Factors affecting the site speed:
Following are some important factors affecting the site speed.
- Imperfect Caching
- Page weight
- Some unoptimized images
- Loading of unwanted plugins
Imperfect Caching:
Happens due to cache-controls or expire headers are missing from the site’s server. Sometimes necessary headers will be present but the expiration period will be very short and therefore does not have much impact on performance.
Page weight:
The amount of resources (Javascript, CSS, PHP files, Videos) a website needs to load makes a huge impact on the site performance. A page that needs more resources will load more slowly. One should always look to reduce the number of files or resources by either combining them to possibly a low number of files.
Unoptimized images:
Websites that have images most often they will not be optimized correctly. Returning back to the example of a restaurant, if someone orders 5 dishes even though his capacity is to eat 3 dishes, in that case the food and money will be wasted for the extra dishes. Similarly, the images with unwanted size and scale will consume more space on the website and result in wastage of the space and reduce the site performance.
Loading of unwanted plugins:
For the wordpress websites, the site performance also affects due to calling the unwanted plugins at the time of loading the homepage. Usage of several plugins on the site also impacts on loading time of the website. This results in loading those plugins while loading the site, and will increase the page loading time even more.
How can developers measure their website speed ?
There are many companies and organizations who build softwares to measure the website speed and provide suggestions in the form of metrics for improving the speed and performance of the website.