It’s possible that you have either experienced a slow loading website, or you’ve had a marketing company throw metrics at you about website speed.

When using a website for work or leisure, it can be incredibly frustrating when the information you want to see doesn’t load in quickly. Often this may lead to you leaving the website and seeking an alternative source for the information you need.

If this happens on your own websites, in the shoes of your customer you can see why it may cost you in terms of leads and sales. Websites can be slow for multiple reasons including:

• The specification and resource availability on the hosting server
• The location of the hosting server
• The web page loading in large files
• The web page loading in files from other sources than the host server
• The web page crunching lots of data taking a while to process
• Your own internet connection speed

There are lots of methods around to help solve these issues including Content Delivery Networks, optimising image and script file sizes, using a good and well resourced hosting provider.

A good web company will be able to audit slow web pages and work on optimising them to a sensible level, as well as being able to optimise newer websites from the beginning to meet your needs.

It’s also important to keep in mind that on different screen sizes, different versions of files may need to be loading in. For example on a mobile device it isn’t wise to load in the large high resolution desktop version of images. They would provide little benefit to a mobile user, and would eat into a chunk of their data allowance. Most mobile data is transferred via the internet package agreed between the user and their provider meaning it is not only not as fast as a WiFi connection, but it also usually has data limits. As well as being slow loading, you will be eating up a user’s data whilst providing limited value – something they will not likely thank you for.

Most web pages should load in under 2 seconds on any device.

Page speed does have some effect on your rankings in search engines. It is a consideration factor of search engines, and a slow website is also likely to have a negative effect on your bounce rate, which is another ranking factor. This being said, slower websites can still rank well, which is why we still end up visiting them. These will be ranking well based off of other factors such as content quality, location and back links.

You are likely to see if you run page speed tests on your website, there will always be suggestions on what you can improve, no matter how quickly your web page appears to load. These are a good best practise list to get your website to be more efficient, but when your website is already quick, you have to ask yourselves whether the numbers are of enough significance to focus on. For instance doing a rebuild of your entire page structure to shave off milliseconds on the load time is probably effort that could be better spent elsewhere – such as on producing high standard content and building up back links.

With page speed it is always best to remember the human element of your website visitors is what matters most and carries the biggest effect. If you would like me to take a look at your website page speed and how it can be improved, please feel free to drop me an email on [email protected]. I’d be more than happy to speak with you.