If there is one person who knows the importance of speed, it's the fastest man on the planet, Usain Bolt. In today’s digital landscape everyone would agree with Usain that speed is important. Being fast, when it comes to web page load is crucial for 2 very big reasons.
Why is page speed is important?
1. User Expectations: no one wants to wait for a web page to load. These days attention spans are only getting shorter while expectations are getting higher. Speed up or lose visitors to your competitors with faster page loads.
2. Google: page speed is also important for Google search ranking. The faster your website loads the more chance it has to appear before your competitors in the search results. No matter how great your site is - making the people who use your site wait will only frustrate and deter.
How can you speed up your website?
No amount of hours of training on a treadmill will make your website fast. Reach out to your web developer to get the ball rolling. There are several aspects that your developer can help with starting with these:
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Image Size: always make sure the images and photos are sized appropriately for where they appear on the page and compressed using compression services. Never, ever, upload the orginal photo directly from your camera without first resizing and compressing. Our favourite compression services are imagerecycle.com and tinypng.com. Google, and the people who use your site, will appreciate the lean optimized image files.
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Server performance: The next biggest factor in page speed is server performance. Ensure you are on a fast and reliable web hosting platform that can deliver your website quickly. Often discount shared hosting means your website may be impacted by the performance and bandwidth of all the other sites it shares with.
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Coding best practice: This will require implementing some key best practices of minifying client side coding and placing code files at the bottom of pages. There are several tools your developer can use to sort through the complexity of code optimization. Our favourite tool for testing performance is Google PageSpeed Insights and Webpage Test
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Database queries: Most websites use databases and queries to manage content and by default these queries are generally not optimized. Have your developer review the database queries to ensure they are optimized and only returning the data that will be used on the website. Efficient queries will go a long way to delivering dynamic content fast.
Find out if it's time to upgrade your website
Tony
Director and Founder
Inorbital founder and digital solution architect with over 20 years’ experience planning and directing dynamic web presence and web applications for all types of savvy organizations. When not directing Inorbital you can find him actively trying something completely new.