The Importance of Load Time on Your Website
Nov 18, 2016
We all know that having a prolonged page load time can result in customers clicking off of your website, but did you know it can also impact on your overall SEO ranking in Google? At a recent conference in New York it was revealed that Google will start to rank mobile sites on their load speed, so although it may not be quite as important as good content and links, it will have an impact.
In fact, Amazon recently found that sales on their site were impacted if their load speed was low. They reported increased revenue of 1% for every 100 millisecond improvement to their site speed.
There are certain factors that can affect the speed your website loads; we have taken a look below at how you can make improvements to your site.
1- Images
The two main factors when it comes to images are format and size. Having a huge image on your page will cause slow load time and mean a bad user experience for your customers, so be sure to crop your images to the right sizes before uploading them to prevent this.
When it comes to image format, JPEG is the way to go. Lots of people incorrectly believe that PNG format means images are a higher resolution, but this won’t really be apparent on websites and not all old browsers fully support it. It’s best to only use GIFs for small or simple graphics, and never use TIFF or BMP files!
A few other tips for image use are to reduce colour depth and to remove image comments, if you follow all of these tips you are sure to have fast loading images on your website!
2- Enable browser Caching
When you first visit a website, the elements from that page have to be downloaded, so aspects such as the HTML document, stylesheets and much more. This can result in load time being increased; however, if you allow caching on your site, what this does is store that information onto your computer’s hard drive, so when you click onto the site in future, the information is already there available.
This will result in much quicker load times for your website once customers have clicked onto it once. Obviously you will still need to ensure that load times are low for first time users, but with caching you can ensure it gets even faster the more people visit your site.
3- Reduce plugins
A plug in is a piece of software that enhances or adds functionality to a website, this means that animations or video can be played, there can be sounds and audio files as well as the ability to read adobe documents and much more. Plugins have become essential to modern websites, so we’re definitely not saying to get rid of them completely!
Make sure to go through any plugins on your website and delete any that are unnecessary, as well as doing tests to check which ones are slowing the site down.
4- Reduce Redirects
Redirects are put in place when you have a responsive website; they take customers from your original site to the responsive version. What they do is create additional HTTP requests which in turn increases your websites load time.
You will want to keep these to a minimum; one way of doing this is to use a HTTP redirect to send users with mobile user agents directly to the mobile equivalent URL without any intermediate redirects. All a bit technical I know, I’d leave it to the developers!
There are plenty of other ways you can work around load times for your website, but if you’re not technical minded, we would be happy to help! Just click here to be directed to our contact form, or alternatively call us on 01322 252292.
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