Why does website load speed matter?

Load speed is sometimes overlooked as a component of a website’s technical wellbeing. If a website is too slow in displaying pages (or products) that a user wants to see, it can be damaging to both web traffic and ecommerce values.

Why? Page load speed is an important part of a user’s website experience. If this is damaged beyond repair, it can harm your website’s authority and ability to attract the users that it depends on. It’s all well and good having a website that is aesthetically pleasing or functionality that adds quirky navigation but this isn’t necessarily what users want if it affects the amount of time that the page takes to load.

From a search engine perspective, Google favours websites that load faster. Load speed has become a big factor in search engine rankings and has become an ever bigger one with the advent of mobile-first indexing.

So, how can you affect the load speed of your website and improve it?

Gzip Compression

Making sure the files for your website load faster from the server is part of the process. If it’s required, ask your server hosting provider if they use compression on their servers. Alternatively, you can test whether your website has Gzip compression enabled through this tool.

Using Gzip compression can save a significant amount of bandwidth usage when your website is loading.

Image Optimisation

Image optimisation is often overlooked in terms of a simple process that can save significant amount of bytes in the rendering process. Often, images can be uploaded to web pages at a quality rate that is too high and certainly unnecessary for the website.

Using the correct image format for images and photos is important for the balance of the website. Also ensuring that the dimensions of the image are no larger than what is normal for your website is essential. This is especially important for mobile in terms of using responsive images for the device that is accessing the website.

There are web-based image optimisation tools that you can use to ensure that your images are optimised correctly e.g. TinyPNG or Optimizilla.

Minification and Concatenation

Watch your weight. Your page weight that is! The process of minification involves stripping unnecessary data while concatenating parts involves joining processes together in order to reduce the number of requests being served.

These two processes should be essential in reducing page weight on your website.

Requests can hinder load speed as this slows down the time that the page can render to the user. The use of jQuery can greatly reduce the number of resources used and subsequently result in faster rendering.

What can I use to test my load speed?

There are several tools that you can use to test load speed. The tools that we, here at Tecmark, use to test website load speed are listed below:

• Google’s PageSpeed Insights
• GTMetrix
• Web Page Test