Is Your Website Too Slow?

This is something you need to account for with and there are various things you need to consider that affect this.

Aside from your website visitors there is also Google to consider as their search rankings now consider a website’s speed when placing it in their rankings, so it’s more important than ever to keep your website loading quickly in order to keep customers on your site and for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

Another consideration is mobile visitors. With mobile making up such a huge amount of online browsing, having as site that loads slow on a computer, will be magnified on a mobile device that's using a mobile internet connection.

Increasing speed of your website

There are various methods and programs that you can use in order to keep your website as fast as possible.

But before you do anything, you should more than likely check your site’s load speed. You can do this by using various programs such as Screaming Frog & Pingdom which crawl the website like Google and flags any pages that time out or take too long to load. Flagging a page also prevents Google from crawling them itself, allowing you to remove heavy pages from being indexed, improving Google’s view of your site load times. There are also websites which can compare your website speed to your competitors by racing to see which will load up first.

Other programs can be used to help monitor your website’s performance, specifically speed. Pingdom is one of these and monitors your site and informs you on error messages, HTTP status, content changes, etc. This is also includes the website’s speed performance so if you ever have a speed problem, Pingdom will notify you about this so you can then take measures to improve it.

Real User Monitoring is a feature it uses and lets you see user’s performance data, giving you insight into website load time from a user’s perspective. A similar but weaker program is Google’s Page Speed Insights, which ranks your page speed out of 100 but doesn’t give any help or tips to improving it.

After you find out your site has slow loading times, you must then find out why this is the case. The most common reasons are due to site design or your hosting server, but the problem isn’t limited to this, as it can also be potentially due to small alterations that can cause things to slow down such as adding in a new logo/background image. In fact, images in general can get out of hand with their file size causing slowness on your site.

The solution to this is image compression, as it still keeps the quality of the image while decreasing the load times due to smaller compressed images. Considering how important and widely used images are, with almost all sites having images in one form or another then anyone’s site can benefit from file compression.

Using browser caching on your site is ideal for every site to employ, so if someone is visiting your website multiple times within a short period of time then the temporary website files will be stored on their machine, reducing server lag and increasing load speeds. Your typical user won’t clear their cache often either so regular use of your website will become easier and load faster for them all of the time as long as your site isn’t at fault.

And finally, reducing the size of your HTML code can also make a difference to your website speed. Taking out any unnecessary blank space in your code or getting rid of parts of code you can shorten or don’t use.

Website Speed matters and testing your site and making sure it runs nice and fast is critical.