Why is my site so SLOW at loading?
Jun 02, 2017
Bored of waiting for your site to load? Well, so are your web visitors! Page loading time is an important part of any website’s user experience. With the average user having no patience for a page that takes too long to load, it’s a contributing factor for page abandonment, and no business wants that.
Kissmetrics conducted a survey and found that 47% of consumers expect a site to load in 2 seconds, and not only that, customers have extremely high expectations. It’s not only customers that like a fast site; Google does too. Site speed is a ranking factor; if you don’t focus on delivering the fastest desktop and mobile friendly experience then I’m afraid your competitors will, and Google will rank those pages above your own.
Reduce Server Response Time
Server time is the amount of time it takes for a web server to respond to a request from a browser. To improve your server time you have two options: learn to use the hosting service you have more efficiently or pay more for hosting and hardware. There is a great blog post dedicated to this topic on Varvy's website that explains this in much more detail and it’s simple to follow as well!
Reduce Redirects
Redirects cause your pages to load much slower – have you ever come across a road closure and they divert you, normally in a confusing way that causes you to get lost? Redirects embedded on your site work in exactly the same way. Every time you redirect your visitor to a different page they face additional time waiting for the HTTP request- response cycle to complete.
Images – What to change?
- Optimising
Images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a website. This, by no means, means you need to sacrifice the quality and features for performance. The word optimise means to rearrange or rewrite to improve efficiency or retrieval of processing. Essentially, when an image is optimised the file size decreases dramatically more than any other aspect of the average page. It is one of the easiest web performance tasks you can do.
- Save for Web
When first exporting your image, ‘Save for Web’ can be the first thing to reduce file size whilst keeping the quality. One thing to note is that every 10 points on the 0-100 quality gauge when exporting an image makes the JPEG file 30-50 per cent larger. If you’re worried about quality when choosing a percentage, use the toggle to zoom in close or view the image at its natural size. This will help judge how much further you can push the value.
- Audit and Remove
Spend some time to go through all your images on your site. Be critical and analyse your earlier design decisions. Ask yourself- do you really need that image?
Here at The Creation Lab, we deal with all this so you don’t have to! Don’t know your HTML from your HTTPS? That’s ok; we’ll go through training with you so you can use your fully fledged bespoke website in no time. If you feel like it’s time to give your website a refresh- call us on 0800 644 7070 or enter your details for a quick quote. Any question you have in terms of site speed you’re welcome to tweet us @thecreationlab- we’d be happy to help!
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