Website speed
Website speed is how quickly a browser loads the website’s content. Website speed is important as it could make or break the success of your website. Having good page speed is also an important contributing factor to achieving good rankings in search engines.
Impacts of a slow site speed
A slow site could increase your bounce rate. Bounce rate is when a user clicks on your website and leaves without viewing more than one page. If your page is slow then it is likely users will leave your slow loading website and find another site that is quick to load that provides them with the same items they wanted to view.
You could see a fall in your conversion rate if your site is slow to load. A conversion is generally when a website visitor makes a purchase. If your site is slow potential customers will become frustrated and shop elsewhere. Studies show that websites with fast page speed had better conversion rates.
The user experience will be poor. It’s essential that the customer’s needs are met and satisfied. Slow response and load time will result in poor user experience. This can cause users to become frustrated, leave your site or leave bad reviews.
Causes and solutions
Largest contentful paint is the factor that determines how quick the main content of a web page will load. If this is too high then your page could take too long to load. This could be affected by image size, videos and animations.
- Compress your images. This reduces image weight.
- Enabling browser caching, which is when you tell the browser to remember certain information so that the next time that page is visited not every element has to be reloaded.
- Reduce unused JavaScript – this reduces render-blocking behaviours.
Total blocking time is the time it takes for the page to load the users requests. If this is too high the main thread becomes blocked. If this occurs your web page cannot respond to the users actions.
- Layout (the process of calculating the position of objects in space subject to various constraints) – try to avoid layouts where possible. Lots of elements will take time to work out the dimensions and locations of these.
- JavaScript – If you reduce the execution time of the JavaScript then the the total blocking time will also become reduced.
Time to interactive is the time it takes for a page to become fully interactive. This is what could be causing a frustrating user experience so it is best to minimise this for page speed and user satisfaction.
- Preloading fonts – this will tell the users browser to load the important fonts first.
- Removing unused (CSS) which will reduce the time the browser processes the style and layout.