Website Loading Speed
Every one of us knows that a faster website is better than a slower one. But we often do not understand how crucial speed is for the success of the website.
Why is it important?
When it comes to website loading time, the recommended maximum load time for websites is 2-3 seconds. If it is an e-commerce website, then the recommended loading time is 2 seconds or less.
If the website loading speed is lower than this, then it can cause multiple detrimental factors as mentioned below:
Effect on business
If the website loading time is high, most of the users will lose their patience and leave the website and move on to your next available competitor before going on to either buy anything or even considering your services.
This behavior is calculated as bounce rate and it is the most widely detrimental factor to most online businesses.
Customer retention
In case the website speed is low, when someone tries to buy something from your website or else tries to view an image, and he/she may experience a delay. This might cause user dissatisfaction and that customer might move on to other available options for his/her needs.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is another major factor for keeping the website speed as high as possible. Google considers website loading time to be a factor for your ranking amongst your competitors. If your website speed is not optimal, this will cause a loss in your business too as your search engine visibility will decrease, leading to a loss of new customers.
How to increase website loading speed?
If your website loading time is more than 2-3 seconds, then the following factors need to be considered:
Choose the correct Web Hosting
Use appropriate Media file formats
Use HTTP Persistent Connection
Using Content Delivery Network
Choose the correct Web Hosting
This is a most commonly ignored factor by most startup businesses and yet one of the most important factors for website speed. One needs to provide the optimal memory and CPU in order for increased processing speed.
Another highly overlooked factor is the Hard Disk type of the server. Most cheaper plans have conventional HDDs. However by upgrading to SSDs, the speed at which the server can write and read data and serve it up to visitors can increase from 5 – 20 times. This will increase the overall loading time of the website too.
When a web page is loaded in the browser, all the media content is actually downloaded from the server and served to you via the browser. Hence if the size of the images used in the page is large, a higher amount of time will be needed to download those from the server. Hence we need to optimize the media file sizes in such a way that the size can be the smallest possible, while retaining the image quality.
Use appropriate Media file formats
The most commonly used image formats are JPEG and PNGs. While these images are supported in all browsers, the image sizes are relatively higher, which may cause the page load time to increase. The best alternative for this is to use webP formats and serve them to the browsers which supports webP. Most of the updated browsers support webP nowadays, which will decrease the average load time for most of the site visitors. However, a fallback mechanism needs to be present which will serve the JPEG and PNG formats to the older browsers for the visitors who use those.
Each time a web page is viewed, a lot of server resources and time is used to perform a series of complex calculations, for example, the headers and footers of the page, the sidebars, latest blogs, images etc. What caching basically does in essence, it that it stores a copy of the final html file, which can be served to the website visitors, bypassing al the calculations needed.
This increases the website load time by a huge factor and also decreases the load on the server.
Use HTTP Persistent Connection
HTTP persistent connection, also called HTTP keep-alive, is the concept of using a single TCP connection to send and receive multiple HTTP requests, instead of opening a new connection for every single request/response pair. The newer HTTP/2 protocol does the same thing and also allows multiple concurrent requests/responses to be sent over a single connection.
This decreases the loading time, server CPU usage and network congestion.
Sometimes, in order to handle broken links, redirects are used for deleted, renamed or moved web pages. Google advises to keep the number of redirects to an absolute minimum and avoid it completely if possible.
This will decrease the number of HTTP requests, thereby decreasing the web page loading time.
Some websites use resources (e.g.: images) which are hosted in another website. If any other website is doing the same with your images by pointing towards your website, they are using your server resources. You need to prevent the option for hotlinking to your website in order to prevent this issue.
Some developers might develop websites with huge blocks of code that only perform simple functions. This results in poorly coded websites that loads slowly. By avoiding such coding practices, there will be a notable difference in speed in the website.
This holds true for the Content Management System ( e.g.: WordPress) themes and plugins too. If the themes and plugins are poorly coded and managed, that will impact the website speed too.
Using Content Delivery Network
Although there is a major improvement in speed by using CDN, one should use these if they are targeting website visitors from multiple parts of the world. It is basically a network of linked servers located in multiple locations across the world, which holds a copy of the web resources of your website. If someone from USA tries to visit your website, the resources will be served to them from a server, closest to them, thereby decreasing the latency.
These were the major ways to decrease website loading time and increase its speed. Other than these, there are also multiple other factors which needs to be considered in order to improve the website performance further like Minification of html/CSS, GZip compression, removing render-blocking javascript etc.
We hope this article helped in understanding the importance of website speed and the factors that are linked to it.
We recommend that you consider consulting professionals when it comes to website speed optimization (especially if the load time is less than 2-3 seconds) as website loading speed can literally make or break your business.