How Website Load Time and Page Speed Impact Customer Behaviour
In an era where consumers expect instant gratification, a slow-loading website can have severe consequences for customer behaviour.
7 Things You Need To Know About Optimising Your Page Speed
Having a website that performs well for you, your users and search engines is a key signal that you are doing things right.
Written By Attila Kuti
Apr 2023 / Reading Length: 5 minutes
Having a website that performs well for you, your users and search engines is a key signal that you are doing things right. But what do we mean when we say “performs well” especially when optimising your page speed?
In this article we will delve a little deeper into what page speed is, how it can reduce load time and other things to consider when trying to make improvements in this area.
If your website is performing well, for you as a business, it means that your website is meeting the KPIs that you set out for it, whether that be sales, leads, page views, etc. For the user, it means that they found exactly what they were looking for from your site and have had a great experience of your company.
As for search engines, they are looking for several things when it comes to your website performance, but one of the key things is your page speed.
Page Speed
In a nutshell, page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your page loads.
Page speed is often confused with “site speed,” which is actually the page speed for a sample of page views on a site. Page speed can be described in either “page load time” – the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page or “time to first byte” – how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the webserver. Further research has also shown that a slow page speed means search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget – this could be disastrous for your website’s indexing!
You can evaluate your page speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. PageSpeed Insights Speed Score incorporates data from CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) and reports on two important speed metrics: First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOMContentLoaded (DCL).
Best practice for SEO
Google has mentioned that site speed (and page speed, for that matter) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. It is also possible that Google might be specifically measuring time to first byte when it considers page speed.
Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Making page speed important to the user experience. Longer load times have also been shown to negatively affect conversions.
Here’s how you can help reduce your page loading time when optimising your page speed:
- Limit the amount of redirects – every time a page redirects to another page, it adds additional waiting time on for the user. Limit your use of redirects and avoiding several redirects for one page. For example: www.yoursite.com > www.yournewsite.com > www.yournewsite.com/home
- Enable compression – Use something like WP Rocket, a software for file compression, to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes. Don’t use it on images files though. This should be done via a software like Photoshop to help retain image quality.
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML – optimising the code on your website can dramatically increase your page speed. This should include removing spaces, commas, formatting and unused code.
- Use browser caching – Browser caching means that when visitors come back to your site, the browser remembers a lot of information in its cache (things like stylesheets, images and JavaScript files to name a few) so it doesn’t need to load them all over again from scratch.
- Improve server response time – This is where good hosting pays its dividends but also look at the information called on a page and see where slow database queries, slow routing or a lack of memory may occur so that you can fix them. The optimal server response time is under 200ms so you need to work at getting as close as possible to that.
- Use a content distribution network (CDN) – also know as a content delivery network, this is a system of distributed servers that deliver web content to a user based on their geographic location. A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos. While a CDN does not host content and can’t replace the need for proper web hosting, it does help cache content at the network edge, which improves website performance.
- Optimise images – Image optimisation is a process of saving and delivering images in the smallest possible file size without reducing the overall image quality. So make sure that your images are compressed for the web in a jpeg, gif or png format depending on the nature of the image and that it is no larger than it needs to be. Also, the use of sprites for frequently used images like buttons and icons on your site will also save load time.
Google have very handily provided a free page speed tool to help you check all of these areas and identify issues.
Other things to consider:
Responsive design
A responsive website means that you don’t have a separate website for mobile, tablet and PC, you just have one site that adapts to whatever screen it’s being displayed on. Since 2015, Google has taken a websites responsiveness into consideration, favouring mobile-friendly sites over non-friendly on mobile results. Mobile web traffic has overtaken desktop and now makes up the majority of website traffic, accounting for more than 51%.
Social Signals
Social signals are human interaction metrics on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Medium, etc. Some examples of social signals are: likes, dislikes, shares, votes, pins, views, etc. which commonly help to showcase popularity and affinity for a specific piece of content. In 2010, both Google and Bing confirmed that social media was a determining factor in ranking – so if you haven’t already been using social media, you better get on there and start engaging quickly!
There’s things you can do to help inform search engines about your social media accounts, and techniques you can use too … boost your contents performance through sharing, social profiles rank in search terms and use social to attract visitors to your site.
Site audit
Website audit reports are the key to giving your site a comprehensive checkup. Maybe you’ve never audited your website before or you have a redesign planned for the future. A website audit can help you compare your website to your competitors, improve your SEO, optimise conversion rates, optimise your website performance and identify issues early.
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