Is Your Website Loading Speed slow?

The internet is growing at a rapid pace. Everyday thousands of new website are registered. The users/customers won’t there work to be completed at a rapid pace . Hence, the speed of the website must be good otherwise you might lose your customer. Your website speed is also included as a ranking factor.

Slow site will incur penalties from google.

What is Holding You Back?

There are a lot of factors that could be hampering and slowing down your site, including:

·         Huge uncompressed images.

·         Unoptimized  apps and plugins that doesn’t do anything useful

·         An overabundance of ads(single article contains more than 4ads)

·         Too many widgets

·         Ancient, unoptimized and outdated code.

·         Too many redirects

·         Poor  and slow hosting

Why Does It Even Matter?

Web site speed matters as Google wants to appease its searchers or users. And searchers don’t want to wait. They want fast results.

 If you have relevant content but your website speed is very slow you will be inviting google penalties .A fast-loading page gives a better user experience. It helps visitors  what you have can offer, makes it easy for them to multitask.

Does website speed impact conversions?

Walmart found that they could get a 2% increase in conversions for every 1 second of site speed improvement.

 The study also found that for every 100 milliseconds of improvement, revenues grew by up to 1%.

How to Speed Up Your Site

The first step to speed up is to get your site analyzed.

You can start by heading over to PageSpeed Insights and have Google analyze your site speed. This will give you a good overview of your current situation and where you can make improvements.

You will encounter lot technical jargon here  but you can check out this page to learn more about the specifics of Google’s Speed and Usability Rules.

How to Improve Site Speed:

·         Avoid landing page redirects – A redirect adds additional request-response cycles, which is just adding more work before a page can be displayed.

·         Enable compression on your website resources – You can reduce the size of the transferred data by up to 90%.

·         Find ways to improve server response time – Your server response time should be less than 200ms.

·         Take advantage of browser caching – Some resources can be cached by the browser to load previously downloaded resources from the local disc instead of the network.

·         Optimize your images have reduced their file size without impacting the quality to save many bytes of data.

·         Optimize CSS and HTML coding – External stylesheets have to be downloaded and processed, which can extend the time it takes to render the page.

·         Prioritize your visible content – If many trips to the network are required to render the things that appear above the fold, it can cause a problem.

·         Remove render blocking JavaScript – Avoid or minimize the use of JavaScript that must be fetched before it can be executed.

·         Use asynchronous scripts – Asynchronous scripts load more quickly, which means users don’t have to wait for a script to finish loading before the page fully renders.

There are a wide range of tools available that can help you deal with many of these things.

How to Improve Usability:

·         Avoid plugins whenever possible – This has become most important with the trend towards mobile, as many of these plugins lead to hangs, crashes  and other problems. There are web technologies that can do the same things these days.

·         Configure the viewport – It’s important to specify a viewport that adapts to different devices. This will make sure mobile devices render correctly.

·         Size your content to the viewport – If your content isn’t working in concert with the viewport, the images and text may be bigger than the display. This really negatively impacts the mobile experience.

·         Size tap targets appropriately – If users are going to tap buttons or images on the site, then make sure that they’re sized to make it easy.

·         Use legible font sizes – If the font is too small to be readable, you are making it too hard to consume. A base size of 16 CSS pixels is recommended.

Try all the steps mentioned above. If you encounter any problem we are happy to assist you. Just shoot us a email.