The Site Speed statistics demonstrate how quickly visitors can access and engage with information. You can pinpoint areas that require work and then monitor how far those improvements have come.
Site speed reports measure three aspects of latency: the time it takes for a sample of pageviews to load on your site, the computational efficiency or load speed of any separate hit, event, or user interfaces you want to track, and the speed at which the browser parses documents and makes them accessible for user interaction.
Why is Site Speed Important?
A browser’s ability to rapidly deliver perfectly functioning web pages from a particular site is referred to as website speed, also known as website performance. Users tend to leave websites whose functions disappoint and take too long to load.
In contrast, sites that load quickly often bag more visitors than slow ones and convert at higher rates.
Slow websites will generate fewer conversions, have a higher bounce rate, and generate fewer pages per visit. In addition, a slow website means visitors will leave since nobody has the time to wait for a web page to open. When a website’s conversion funnel is lengthy, this is crucial for organisations.
Numerous studies have shown that the conversion rate is impacted by site speed. In contrast to slower sites, visitors to websites that load quickly remain longer and convert at greater rates. In addition, several businesses have discovered that conversion rates tend to rise when page loading times are reduced, even by a few nanoseconds.
A sudden decline in visits results from a website’s sluggish loading performance. Your potential customers may have already disappeared. There is, however, a long-term impact as well. Your organic development and word-of-mouth will be increasingly stunted by that slow loading time.
Site Speed and SEO
Your website’s speed affects how it will rank on Google as a direct ranking element. In addition to affecting SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), page speed can also affect your site’s bounce rate and average session length.
Site speed is a ranking criterion since it first and foremost denotes a high level of user experience. An improved user experience will result from a fast site speed, while a negative user experience will follow a slow site speed. If a site loads more quickly, users tend to stay there longer, convert more effectively, and bounce less. Google has included it as a ranking element as a result.
An acceptable page load time is expected to be a maximum of four seconds. Once you go above that load time, both the user experience and the rankings start to fall short of the ideal. On the other hand, a person would probably see better rankings if they could reduce this page speed to under three to four seconds.
Site Speed Checks
It’s crucial to speed-test the website from a distant location in addition to one that is local to your data centre. By doing this, you may also see how big of an effect the CDN (Content Delivery Network) has on the site. You can temporarily disable your CDN and retest to notice the change fully.
The main issue is that many people only ever run a speed test once. The material is frequently not cached in this situation, making the site appear to be slower than it is. This may also occur if you recently deleted the cache on your website or CDN.
There are numerous site speed test tools and site speed tests for smartphones to choose from if you’re unsure how to measure the speed of your website. The suggested tools are listed below:
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Pingdom
- GTMetrix
Google PageSpeed Insights
An effective tool for measuring website speed is Google PageSpeed Insights, which assigns your site a score between 0 and 100. Of course, the faster your website performs, the higher the score.
The best thing is that the score is accompanied by recommendations for enhancing the functionality of your site. Some of which can be put into practice immediately.
By measuring how quickly your website loads each step of the page, PageSpeed Insights compares it to Google’s fundamental web standards.
Pingdom
Pingdom has no login requirements. However, the findings are less thorough than that of Google PageSpeed Insights. The site’s performance is rated from 0-100, and the split of response codes, content size, request kinds, inquiries by domain, and a waterfall flowchart that shows specifics on your file load times are also provided.
GTMetrix
You’ll receive two primary ratings at the end of the test: performance and layout. Other ways that GTMetrix breaks down results include a speed visualisation that shows your page load as a timeframe of screen capture at each core web vital. It also gives you a structure evaluation that identifies page optimisation areas and a waterfall chart that tracks the loading times of individual page elements.
How to Improve Site Speed
Below are steps and tips that you must stick to to improve your website’s site speed.
Use Content Delivery Network
By storing cached copies of content in many locations worldwide, CDNs increase the speed of websites. In contrast to the host server, CDN caching servers are often situated closer to end users.
Requests for materials are sent via a content delivery network server rather than directly to the hosting server, which could be miles away and connected to a couple of autonomous networks. As a result, a CDN can significantly reduce the time it takes for pages to load.
Say No to Hotlinking
When a picture posted on your server is used by another website, this is known as hotlinking. Due to the server being overloaded with requests, this consumes a significant amount of bandwidth and causes delayed loading speeds. Hotlinking can be avoided by including a short piece of code in the .htaccess file.
Reduce Images
Internet traffic is largely made up of images, and as picture files are typically bigger than HTML and CSS files, they frequently take the slowest to load on a website. Fortunately, image optimisation helps speed up image loading.
Image compressors are widely available online for free, and site managers can use them to reduce the resolution, compress the files, and reduce the size of photographs.
Try Avoiding Redirects
A redirect occurs when users of one website are instead forwarded to another. Redirects increase the time it takes for a website to load by a few hundredths of a second or even by an entire second. Each second is essential when it comes to developing a performance-based website. Therefore, even though they are, on some occasions, inevitable, redirects must be implied until necessary.
Minify Files with CSS and JavaScript
Code comments, whitespace, and unused semicolons are examples of items developers should remove from a piece of code to make it easier for computers to understand and execute.
JavaScript and CSS documents are compressed, and because of this, they load quickly and use less bandwidth. Minification will not increase the speed in bulk. However, it will help improve the website’s performance when used for conjunction and other suggestions.
Wrapping Up
The digital customer era is now, and accessibility and quality are important for these digital customers. Flexibility and usability are important as well—likewise, speed. If your site is slow, this digital customer will locate another website that provides them with the same item but a far faster response time. So don’t let something as simple as loading time cost you, consumers.
Free Coding Basics
If you’re new to software development, some of the terms in this article may seem daunting. However, anyone can learn to code. Try our free 5 Day Coding Challenge and learn the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Register now through the form below.
Try our Free 5 Day Coding Challenge 
Take our full stack course 
