Site speed is hugely important when it comes to SEO. Don’t just take our word for it though.
Here’s what happens from a seemingly insignificant one-second increase in a web page’s load time:
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Pageviews decrease by 11%
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Customer satisfaction goes down by 16%
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Conversion rate decreases by 7%
CrazyEgg, the company that completed the study above, found that 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
You need to give your visitors what they want and fast.
If you can’t, they’ll vote with their mice - usually back to the search results and straight onto your competitor’s lightning-fast site instead.
Now, while a two-second load time may be somewhat unrealistic (Machmetricsfound that the average site loads in 8.66 seconds), you need to do everything in your power to stop haemorrhaging traffic to your competitors due to slow load times.
And with site speed being entirely within your control, there is no excuse.
Here are a few tips to help you make your website load as quickly as possible...
1. Test, Test, Test!
You can’t just manually test your website in your internet browser to see how quickly it loads.
If you have caching enabled, then it won’t load the entirety of your site from the server, so it’ll load more quickly than it would for a new visitor.
Thankfully, there are plenty of free tools available online that you can use instead.
Here are a few of our favourites:
Even better?
Not only will these tools tell you how quickly your site loads, but you’ll also get a detailed list of problem areas and recommendations on how you can fix these to boost your site’s speed.
2. Resize and Compress Your Site’s Images
Images are easily one of the most common reasons why websites load slowly.
If your site uses full-blown images, for example, 3000 x 2000 pixels (or something equally large) which you then scale via CSS to 300 x 200 pixels (or something equally small), you have a problem.
A visitor’s browser will need to load the entirety of the larger image (often several megabytes in size) before it can be displayed, and it’ll then need to scale it to the correct size which will delay things even more.
Add just a few of these types of images to your web page and your load time will go through the roof.
The solution?
First, physically resize the image to whatever dimensions it’ll be appearing on-screen.
Then, compress the image to reduce the overall file size by as much as possible.
When it comes to compressing images, the one resource that we use time and time again is tinypng.com, which handles both PNG and JPEG formats.
3. Minify Your HTML, CSS, and Javascript Files
‘Minifying’ is the process of optimising your website’s code to remove things like white spaces, commas, line breaks, code comments, and unused sections of code.
Removing these unnecessary items and characters helps reduce the overall file size, helping it load faster to boost a website’s speed.
You can minify all files sent to a visitor’s browser from the server, including HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Google recommends several different resources to help you do thishere.
If you aren’t particularly tech-savvy, we’d recommend working with a developer to complete this step.
4. Use Browser Caching
By activating browser caching, you allow parts of your website to be stored in a visitor’s browser cache.
While this won’t speed up their first visit to your site, it realistically reduces the load time of any repeat visits by allowing saving and reusing of your website’s files.
You can specify how long browsers should keep various things like HTML files, CSS stylesheets, and images in your site’s HTTP headers.
All you need to do is edit your site’s .htaccess file to set specific expiry times for each type of file.
A word of caution here though...
Longer isn’t necessarily better.
Yes, too short and you’ll keep regular visitors waiting around while your site loads, but too long, and it could lead to cached versions of your site being shown in favour of actual up-to-date versions.
You need to strike a balance.
Again, as with minifying your code, if you aren’t up-to-speed, or don’t feel comfortable with modifying your site’s HTTP headers, then get a developer to do it for you.
5. Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN)
CDN’s are a group of servers spread throughout the world that significantly improve the load time of your site.
They work by taking copies of your site’s pages and files for caching, including HTML files, javascript files, CSS stylesheets, and multimedia like images and videos at each server location.
The basic concept is that the closer a server holding your site’s data is to a visitor, the quicker it will load.
For example, without a CDN, a site visitor from Australia may need to access a site’s data that is located on a server in the United Kingdom.
With a CDN though, it’s highly likely that a server located in, or very close to, Australia would handle the request, massively reducing the time taken from the access request to the site loading fully.
They’re a relatively cheap and easy way to boost your site speed.
About the Author
Jonathan is a Senior Growth Strategist the Belfast SEO agency, BOOM. Jonathan spends most of his time optimising his clients' websites for massive traffic growth, but outside of business hours, he can usually be found reading or planning his next winter holiday.
