What is site speed?
Site speed refers to the average time it takes for a website to load its page completely in the browser. The quicker your content is made available to visitors, the higher the possibility of conversions and reducing the bounce rate are. A fast load time makes the website more navigable.
What factors affect site speed?
Here are key factors that affect site speed:
- Server performance
- Server location
- Amount of traffic
- Images are too big
- Code
- Too many plugins
1. Server Performance
The server is like the machine that hosts the website. When a user clicks to enter the web page, his browser sends a request to the server asking to download all the information and content that are hosted there to view them. If the server response time is slow, the site will take longer to load, regardless of how optimized the other resources of the website are. If you want your website to perform well, avoid hosting services that are too cheap.
2. Server Location
Although the transmission of information through the Internet is very fast, it is not instantaneous. Just as a phone call from China to Canada may have some delay in transmission, the same applies to the Internet. Since each user comes into contact with the server that hosts the website in question, if the server is too far from the user’s location, loading the website will take longer given the server response time. Therefore, when choosing the location of the server, try to define it according to the target audience of the website.
3. Amount of Traffic
The more people access the website, the more effort the server will have to make. Although most server rooms are extremely powerful, you are limited to your subscription plan and the amount of traffic it allows. Therefore, if you expect a high amount of traffic, choose a server that offers adequate performance.
4. Images Are Too Big
To prevent slow server response time, the images must not weigh too much or be of the wrong size. Correct management of images should respect the following rules:
- Good resolution (measured in dpi)
- Reasonable size (look at the JPG or PNG file)
- Avoid using too many images
Be mindful of where you find your images as certain hackers employ them to compromise the security of websites!
5. Code
Every website has a large number of lines of HTML, CSS, and Javascript code. The code should be simplified and not be too heavy in order not to reduce the site load time. Also, it is important to keep external JavaScript and CSS resources to a minimum. For example, if a site calls 20 external resources each time it loads, 100 users accessing the website result in 2,000 file requests to the server.
6. Too Many Plugins
It is always best to use as few plugins as possible because each plugin is made by different programmers and its features may be incompatible with those of other installed plugins or with the same WordPress theme used. Also, each plugin is attached with its own CSS file and one or more JavaScript to load, which is a huge burden to load on your server.
Why you need to care about site speed
Here are two good reasons why you need to care about site speed:
- Better user experience
- Higher visibility
Better User Experience
A fast website optimizes the user experience. Patience might be a virtue, but it is best not to test your potential customers on the matter. The abandonment rate of a website reaches 30% if the response time of a page exceeds 4 seconds, and reaches 55% when it reaches 10 seconds of waiting.
No customer likes to wait, be it at the grocery store or while shopping on an e-commerce site. The Internet is full of similar content and resources so if the experience on a particular website is not satisfactory, most users will prefer to close that page and visit another. Having a fast site speed will make your bounce rate considerably lower!
Higher Visibility
Did you know that the loading speed of a website is also a factor that affects its ranking in search results? To this day, loading speed is not one of the main factors that affect the positioning of a site. This means that the faster the site load time, the better that page will rank in search results.
Google’s purpose is to give the best answers to the searches of its users. Think about it, if the websites that load the slowest were in the first results, the quality of the search engine would be poor. Remember that Google puts users first and gives a lot of importance to factors that are directly related to the optimization of the web page.
Search Engine Optimization Services
What website performance metrics are important?
Based on Google Analytics, these are the most important website performance metrics:
- Sessions
- Users
- Pageviews
- Pages/sessions
- Bounce rate
- Most viewed page
- Average time on page
Sessions
Sessions refer to the total number of visits received by the website in a given interval. A session represents the time a user interacts with the site, which ends after about 30 minutes of inactivity or when the traffic source changes.
Users
Refers to all those users who have started at least one session in a given time interval. They can be new users or returning users.
Pageviews
It is the total number of pageviews, including the views when a user reloads the same page or when he changes sections while staying on the website.
Pages/Sessions
This is the average number of pages that a user views in a given session. This metric divides the number of pageviews by the total number of sessions. It’s useful to determine how engaging a website is.
Bounce rate
It is a percentage that reports the number of users who have clicked on the website and who have left after entering. They may not have visited the rest of the pages. However, the lower the bounce rate, the better the performance of the website.
Most viewed pages
Among all the pages of your site or blog, it is also possible to know which are the most visited. This will help you understand which pages need to be improved and which ones should be enhanced.
Average Time on Page
Refers to the average time a user spends on a single page.
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Test Your Site Speed
If your website is loading slowly or you just want to know its speed, you can take advantage of the following free site speed test tools. They will help you analyze and improve the performance and speed of your website.
Pagespeed Insights
Pagespeed Insights is very efficient and simple to use. All you have to do is enter the URL of your website, start the analysis and the tool will give you a score based out of 100. The tool also shares useful tips so you can optimize your website speed.
GT Metrix
GT Metrix was developed by Yahoo! in collaboration with YSlow, Google PageSpeed, Firefox and Firebug. It provides different detailed and effective analyses that serve to improve the speed of your web page.
Pingdom Tool
This tool is used to analyze the website and measure the speed of the page as well as all the files present during its loading.
How to Improve Your Site Speed
Here are some tips to help you improve your site speed:
- Focus on having a responsive design
- Optimize images
- Get rid of what you don’t use
- Use caching plugins
- Get quality hosting
- Choose an efficient platform
- Clean your code frequently and thoroughly
It is necessary to optimize the speed of your website to avoid losing leads, increase sales and be able to retain your customers. Looking for an employee specialized in web development? Finding a developer with whom you are comfortable is crucial. At Publi Web Media, we can find the ideal web developer to bring your vision to life. This is not about contracting us as an agency to develop your website or your web application, but rather to hiring one or more of our resources to work full time and exclusively for your company.
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