How do you know if your website is performing well or poorly? What tools or metrics do you use to measure that performance? So many companies simply have no idea where to start or feel it's too complicated to understand. We are going to try to explain some basics in this blog article.
A website is a set of documents and resources, including different types of scripts (JS), styles (CSS), images, etc. The number and size of resources affect website speed, but there are other factors like processes such as DNS lookups, TCP handshake, or TLS/SSL handshake. Also, the distance between client and server has to be taken into consideration. Some parts of that are impossible to influence, but when developing a website, there are different ways and tools to improve your website's performance.
The better the speed, the better the user experience. Maybe you heard Google is obsessed with speed? Google has used page speed as a ranking factor for desktop searches since 2010, and in July 2018, Google began using page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches as well. If your site's slow load times cause Google to rank it lower on the search engine results page (SERP), your audience is less likely to find it.
In most cases, plenty of your competitors have a website, and if yours does not meet their expectations, they will go to them. These days people expect web pages to load within 2 seconds or less. Google found that 53% of mobile users will leave a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Website speed and performance have never been more important. With a combination of a visually appealing website, good content, and great performance, you can keep customers happy and engaged, which will lead to increased sales and conversions.
We want users to have a good user experience on our website. If it is a presentational site, we want people to get meaningful information as soon as possible. If it's a blog, we want people to read posts, or if it's an online store, we want them to buy stuff with great satisfaction. When your customers come to your website and are trying to access your content which is slowly loading, how satisfied are they going to be? In the digital world, we are incredibly impatient. All of us expect a near-instant response when we try to access some website. Research shows that internet users expect websites to load in less than three seconds. If it's slower than that, it is expected that the user will look for information or a product to purchase on your competitor's website.
It means you can have great design and content, but users will still leave your website, just because it is too slow. Also, more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices on connections that are slower than those available to desktop and laptop computers.
Taking all of that into consideration, website speed and performance have never been more important. With a combination of a visually appealing website, good content, and great performance, you can keep customers happy and engaged, which will lead to increased sales and conversions.
You can start with Google's Lighthouse. It is an automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more.
You can run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, from the command line, or as a Node module. Lighthouse can run a series of audits of the page and then generate a report on how well the page did. From the results, you can see which audits failed with indicators on how to improve the page. Each audit has a reference doc explaining why the audit is important, as well as how to fix it.
You can always visit Google PageSpeed Insights to see how Google ranks your website performance. Its results are based on Lighthouse.
You can also use Google Analytics to help you monitor your page load times across devices, locations, or operating systems. In the Site Speed - Overview report, you can see how your speed has trended, and it will provide you with suggestions on how to improve your website performance. You can also add any standard or custom segments, like how your website is behaving only on mobile devices. This tracking is very important for you to measure the impact of new features on website speed.
Website speed is one of the major contributing factors to abandonment and high bounce rates, which is why you should be proactive in eliminating these common issues that can create a drag on your site.
Delivering HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with GZIP compression reduces the number of bytes that have to travel across the internet. These files that add functionality and styling to your website are the most common culprits for slow websites. Be sure to use various modern methods and techniques (preconnect, preload, prefetch, dns-prefetch) to prioritize your resources and improve the performance and ranking of your site. Also, do not transfer what you do not need. You'll probably find some things that were added a while back and never removed.
In a survey of websites, Google found that 25% of pages could save more than 250KB by compressing images and text, and 10% could save more than 1MB. Pages with large datasets take longer to load, and unnecessarily large file sizes are one of the major reasons for slow websites. A lot of Wordpress clients are used to uploading a lot of large images from their phones. Usually, phone images are easily over 1MB in size, and imagine how it would affect load speed if you have 10, 12, or even 30 images like that. So be sure you minimize the size of your files and images before you upload them to your website.
At least one thing that could be slowing down your website has nothing to do with the site itself. Choosing a proper hosting provider can significantly affect the performance of your website. Always choose a host and a plan that matches the needs of your website and always choose a server with good Server Response Time (TTFB - Time to First Byte). Google recommends you aim for a response time lower than 200 milliseconds. 100ms for TTFB is ideal, and everything over 500ms is an issue.
Every project has to start with choosing the proper technology. Sometimes people will choose a framework or a library that is just overkill for their project, so be careful about that. Maybe it would be better and more efficient to use simply HTML, CSS, and a little bit of JS, but developers would choose Wordpress just because it is easier and faster to finish the project. Just to mention, we don't have anything against Wordpress; we also use it for some projects.
But in the end, it all comes down to the developer's skills. Not every developer can write good and efficient code. Some produce websites with massive blocks of code that only perform minor functions, and it results in a website that loads slowly. You can always use someone with greater experience for code review. Removing some unnecessary blocks of code or some plugins can result in a big boost in your website's performance.
As already mentioned in this article, today's web customers want their information as fast as possible. We also know that it is harder than ever to achieve that as websites have more functionalities than ever. If you find that your website is taking too long to load, do not panic. Use the tools that we listed to test your website speed; they will give you a lot of help and all the suggestions needed.
If you need help with improving your website's performance, contact us, and we will be happy to help you.
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