Website load times are important and effect user engagement and conversions with faster pages ranking and converting better. People are busy and if the load times on your site are slow, users will bounce and click off.

An effective digital marketing strategy combines multiple digital channels to reach prospects, boost awareness and drives qualified visitors to your site where visitors are engaged and convert into loyal customers.

The load speed can be measured either in terms of the time taken to load the first byte of information or in terms of the time taken to fully load the page but essentially the faster it is, the better.

Load Times affect Rankings

Google has said that site speed is now a factor in their ranking algorithm and speed to first byte is probably a factor too as they look to improve user experience but really you should be doing it anyway to improve user engagement and conversions.

What is the Ideal Web Page Load Time?

The page load time standard is considered to be 2 seconds. You should aim to get all of your web page load times below 2 seconds which will improve user experience.

There are plenty of free tools that you can use to test the load time of your site. A good tool that i use to test the speed of your site is www.webpagetest.org. It provides you with a breakdown of the files that are the main problem, helping you to optimise and speed up load times.

How To Speed up Web Page Load Times

Using the reports in Webpagetest (click ‘Performance Review’), to work out which are the problem files. You can compress the problem CSS, HTML and JavaScript files using Gzip. Most images can be reduced in size using Photoshop or a similar program without noticeably affecting the quality. Check that they are in the right format too – PNGs are good for graphics whereas JPEGs are typically best for photographs.

Leverage browser caching to minimise unnecessary file downloads when they revisit your site. Files like stylesheets, images, JavaScript files etc. can be stored in visitors browsers to significantly speed up load times when they revisit. Use the report in Webpagetest to identify the problem files and use httpd.apache.org to set when you want the browser cache to expire. If you site doesn’t change regularly, you should be able to set this to a year without any problems but if you are worries, just reduce the time to one that you are comfortable with.

Use content distribution networks (CDNs) to distribute the load of delivering content. These work by copying your site and storing the copies in multiple data centres across the world so that users have faster access to your site.

Last but not least is server response times. Your server is essentially a computer and the harder it has to work, the slower it goes. The better the hosting package, the more it can handle. The load on you server are visitors and site resources. The more visitors to your site and the more resources that your site requires, the slower the response times. Look for performance bottlenecks, some will be easily solved and some less so. If you can optimise slow database queries then great but you made need to upgrade your hosting package.

If you work your way through the problem files and optimise them according, you will can significantly improve your sites load times. if you have any questions, comment below and I will get back to you as quickly as I can.

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