The rise of the smartphone and the subsequent internet access has created an age in which instant results aren’t just a preference… they’re a necessary that is expected.
Whether it’s searching for the best pizza place near you or shopping for a new laptop, users demand speed. So, for your business website, that makes page speed not just a technical metric but a core part of your user experience, and therefore your digital strategy.
With this in mind and user patience at an all-time low, we thought that this month we would cover what page speed is, and why it can be the difference between gaining that new client or customer and losing them.
What Is Page Speed (And Why Should You Care)?
Page speed refers to how quickly the content on your page loads when someone visits your site. It’s typically measured as either:
- Page Load Time: This is the time it takes to fully display the content on a page on your website.
- Time to First Byte (TTFB): The time it takes for a user’s browser to receive the first byte of data from your server after making a request. Ultimately, it reflects how responsive your web server is. A faster TTFB indicates a better user experience (UX).
Why is this important? Because, as we’ve mentioned, users are impatient – and considerably more so now than they ever have been.
Studies show that if your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, more than half your visitors will abandon it.
Additionally, a slow loading page can have a negative impact on your website’s SEO, with search engines like Google factoring page speed into their ranking algorithms. So, a slow site could be hurting your visibility.
How Page Speed Is Tested
There are several tools that help measure how quickly your site loads and where the bottlenecks are:
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- GTmetrix
- Pingdom Website Speed Test
- Lighthouse (built into Chrome DevTools)
These tools provide scores and actionable recommendations. Most of them provide free account options, but we highly recommend letting the experts undertake this testing. Not only do we have premium accounts that reveal more information, but we also understand exactly what we are looking for.
What Actually Improves Page Speed?
There isn’t a single fix to improve page speed, it is a combination of various optimisations across your website. Here’s what actually works:
- Optimising Content –
- Compress Images: Using modern formats like WebP images help to compress images without noticeable quality loss.
- Lazy Loading: This is a technique where non-essential resources are delayed from loading until they’re required by the user. For example, loading images and videos only when they’re about to appear on the user’s screen.
- Cleaner Coding –
- Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML: This sounds quite technical, but it comes down to essentially stripping out unnecessary characters and spaces from within a file to reduce its size and make it load faster.
- Reduce Third-Party Scripts: This looks at reducing the number of plugins and external scripts that might be slowing your website down.
- Asynchronous Loading: This ensures that the resources on your web page are loaded independently, so they do not block the main content from rendering. This is the opposite to synchronous loading, where resources are loaded sequentially, and page rendering is blocked until all resources are gathered.
- Server & Hosting Configuration –
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN stores copies of your business’s web files on edge servers around the world, helping to speed up content delivery and minimise loading delays.
- Enable Caching: This involves storing copies of your website content in temporary locations (caches) to speed up future requests. So, when a visitor loads a website, their server stores part of the page in a cache – when the visitor goes back to the site, the server can retrieve the cached elements rather than downloading them again.
- Faster Hosting: Not all hosting is created equal — consider upgrading to a better and more performance-oriented provider.
- Database Optimisation –
- Faster Data Retrieval – Optimised databases retrieve data more quickly and reduce the time it takes to process user requests.
- Server Load – Efficient data retrieval results in less strain on the server, meaning it can handle more requests and maintain a faster response time.
How Does Page Speed Affects Audience Behaviour?
Not only does a slow site frustrate new and existing customers or clients, but it can also directly result in costing you business.
- A 1-second delay in page load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
- 79% of users say they won’t return to a site with poor performance.
- Google reports that most people bounce after just 3 seconds of loading.
- Google ranks faster-loading sites higher in search results, which directly impacts your organic traffic.
So, improving your page speed can lower bounce rates, boost conversions, and enhance your SEO — a triple win.
Speed and UX
Talk about UX (user experience) has traditionally referred to design and functionality, but page speed and loading times are now just as important for UX.
It’s safe to say that if your business’s website experiences prolonged, slow loading times, conversions and traffic will see an avoidable decline.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your site looks if users don’t stick around long enough to see it!
As the professionals, we understand that a lot of what we have discussed here is quite technical, and it certainly isn’t something that we recommend working on with expert assistance.
On that note, we would like to offer any and all of our readers here a completely FREE website speed audit!
So, if you need help speeding up your site, get in touch and let’s make your site faster and more effective…
