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How much time are you willing to spend staring at the screen and spinning circle? A few seconds? A minute? A few minutes? It depends on the relevance of the info you expect to see there, but the experience proves people will not stay longer than 1 minute if the website doesn’t load. It is actually the primary answer to why page load time matters that much. First and foremost, it is about the customer’s experience of interaction with the company presented online. It reveals how you appreciate your visitors’ time. Thence, it is essential you make great efforts to optimize and accelerate site speed. Moreover, it may affect your ranking position in Google. Let us try to explain you essential things you might need to know about loading speed, how to check and optimize it for the website’s plain and fast performance.
What is Page Load Time?
In simple words, it is an overall time from the moment you click to open the link and actually see the loaded page. As a rule, it does not exceed a few seconds. However, if there are Internet or loading problems, the user sees simply a blank page and a spinning circle on the tab, indicating the page is still loading. Why is it badly when loading speed is insufficient?
Well, first of all, a great majority of the visitors will decide not to waste their time and quit, meaning they will not get acquainted with your company. You lose a potential order and maybe even a future loyal customer. The second issue is that Google analyses the users’ behavior and if most visitors leave your company page that soon, it will indicate to the searching engine that it is not relevant. Your ranking position in Google may significantly drop.
How to Speed Up Your Website?
It is much simpler than it could seem. We will provide you with three basic things we advise doing to boost the performance of your website:
- Minimize redirects;
- Improve server performance;
- Reduce weight of the page.
Further on, we will discuss each of the points in detail.
Reduce Page Weight
It is evident. The heavier your web pages are, the more time- and effort-consuming it becomes for the server to load them. Thus, it is recommended that the WordPress site page does not take more than 2 MB. If it exceeds this size, this is where the loading troubles begin. Let us analyze the points that may take too much size space and overload the website.
Videos and Pictures
We are living in an era of motion pictures, videos, animation, and special effects. Everybody tries to grab attention by all possible means. However, all those factors usually comprise a great percentage of the page’s weight, retarding the site speed. To avoid this trouble, you may always adjust separate parameters (resolution, quality, format, etc.) of the texts, images, videos you are planning to upload to ensure it is not going to upsize the weight.
JavaScript and CSS
Although these issues are visible neither to the WordPress site owner nor an ordinary user, but they may greatly retard its performance. Is there anything possible to do to accelerate your Google page speed? Well, for the beginning, verify all your CSS and JavaScript files and delete everything needless that retards the speed: extra lines, comments, white spaces, etc.). Adjusting these errors and deleting junk files will definitely minimize the size of the online resource, accelerate speed of its loading, and improve customers’ experience.
Minimize Redirects
They are classic causes that retard the speed. The more redirecting chains, the slower your website will be working. Perfectly, if it contains no more than 3 URLs. Otherwise, it becomes an issue.
Nevertheless, there are cases when redirects are essential. Such a case is rebranding the company or renaming a website so that you do not lose the audience aware and acquainted with the things your company does.
Moreover, an overwhelming quantity of redirecting links complicates the work of Google bots, machines that check the sites. Their crawling budget is limited, so the more redirecting links it has to open, the more it will take from your ranking position.
The older your website will grow, the harder it will be to avoid building redirecting chains. So, you have to be extremely careful when making required changes, thinking of what effect it may have on the speed and performance.
Methods to Reduce the Size of JavaScript
When thinking about decreasing the website’s size, you would have to minificate (delete all unnecessary symbols out of the programming JavaScript and CSS code without changing its functionality). You can take one of the following tools: YUI compressor or JSMin. One more means to modify, parse, and optimize JavaScript is Closure Compiler.
Except for minification, you can use the obfuscation method (it helps to adjust the code in the way it saves its functionality but complicates the analysis, understanding of the working algorithms, and modification). However, it may cause you some bugs when implementing.
Compressing HTML, CSS, and Javascript with gzip or deflate schemes would be helpful to cut down the website even more.
How to Improve Server Performance?
Except for the large HTML size, there many other factors that may affect the Google page speed. Server issues are one of them. It is possible that your server is not powerful enough, and for this reason, your website loads not that fast. What should you do here? You would have to check your hosting service and change the provider.
Loading speed issue is especially critical for iPhones, smartphones, and tabs. When people use mobile devices to surf the net, it frequently implies they are short of time, so your resource should work on its max.
Another crucial issue is cache as approximately 25% of the websites have uncached JavaScript and CSS. The fact implies that the server uploads the same files every time. If you specify caching in the browser heading, it will store and reuse your page’s recourses and not download them again and again, loading fewer data and boosting the website loading speed.
As you see, even such simple steps may solve lots of problems.
Tools to Test and Improve Website Loading Time
Actually, there are too many things that can harm and retard the speed of web page loading. If you are not an IT guy, it may be difficult for you to check and fix it all manually. However, it does not mean there is nothing you can do on your own. Here are a few free and easy tools to use to have the speed loading situation under control.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This tool can provide essential parameters of your mobile and PC website versions’ performance. The program will analyze the user’s behavior and relate your website to one of the categories according to the speed of load. It can be either Fast, Slow, or Average.
If your page is defined other than fast, the tool will suggest a queue of steps that can help you boost the performance. We recommend you to take a close look at the list. However, you should be skeptical here and there.
Another great tool is SEMrush Site Audit. It will show you the graph of your website’s overall performance. There are three basic categories: Errors, Warning, and Notices. Moreover, there are tooltips that will help you to figure out more about each of the points.
Conclusion
Speed always matters. Whether we are talking about a car or a website. Having a direct influence on the user’s online experience with your company, it may become a key point in determining whether he/she places an order and becomes your customer or not. At the same time, it is not that difficult to improve the loading speed. We have provided you with the list of things that can slow it down and applications that would track the technical issues. If you make efforts and monitor the performance of your website, following our advice and making the corresponding adjustments, we are sure your website’s visitors will never have to wait long for the page to load.
