The speed at which your website loads is the absolute first impression you make on a user, and it lays the foundation for how they interact with your site. And with slow page speed, you may lose that user and potential sale in just a few seconds. Think of your own experience while browsing the web. If you click on a promising search engine result but find that the page takes far too long to load, what do you do? You click that back button and try a different site.

Why is Page Speed Important for Your Website?

Page speed refers to the time a visitor waits until all page content is completely loaded. Similarly, site speed is the average page speed for a sample of page views on a site. Both page speed and site speed are important for SEO best practices. If a website is too slow to load, your site likely isn’t getting the traffic you expected and may even be performing poorly in search engine rankings.

Load Time Impacts User Experience

Poor page speed negatively affects user experience and can ultimately result in fewer conversions and returning visitors. Users have little patience for a slow site to finish loading and may even abandon a website with high load times. Fast page speed creates a solid foundation for a pleasant user experience.

Speed is a Search Engine Ranking Factor

In addition to user experience, site speed can also influence search engine ranking and indexation. Google announced in July 2018 that page speed was now a factor that their algorithms use to rank pages. This means that the slower your site speed, the lower your SERP rankings.

Fast Load Time Means More Pages Crawled

High page load times throughout your site can also cause an issue when search engines crawl your site. Search engines have an allocated crawl budget for each site they index. If your website is slow to load, search engines will crawl fewer pages within their crawl budget. A faster site means more pages – and more of your content – gets crawled and indexed.

Five Reasons Your Site May Be Slow

Many things can affect site speed, including some things outside your control like a person’s internet provider. However, there are multiple ways that your design, code, or content may be slowing down your site speed.

Large Images

Images throughout your site engage users and create more interesting pages but may result in slow load times if the images are too large or high resolution. To avoid using high-res images that are too large, make sure you resize them before you upload them for faster load times.

It is also best to use JPEG images. JPEGs improve load speed and are also much smaller than other formats, such as PNG or GIF. If possible, try and use JPEGs as often as possible for better site speed results.

Flash Player Content

Flash may be a great way to encourage more user engagement, but it is also notorious for slowing down page speed. Flash content is usually bulky, and with large content comes long load times. You could potentially reduce the size of your Flash files, but it is better to eliminate Flash entirely if you want to significantly improve your site’s load speed.

Inefficient Code

Think of your site’s code as the instructions for how your website should look and function. If this code isn’t clear and efficient, your page speed will suffer. Executing long and complex code scripts can slow down your ​site’s overall load time. Minifying code or removing all unnecessary characters from the source code without changing the functionality can make big improvements to your site’s speed.

Video Players

Videos are a great way to present information to users in an engaging way, but they can also slow down your website. Videos that are too large and uploaded directly to your site may slow down your overall site speed, especially if multiple users try and watch a video on your website at the same time. Consider hosting your videos on a third-party service, such as YouTube or Vimeo, and then embed those videos on your site. This will save you space and result in faster load times.

Too Many Redirects

Redirects are necessary when you move pages or fix broken links, but each redirect creates an additional HTTP request, which can negatively impact site speed, especially on mobile devices. Unnecessary redirect chains will slow down your site with each request. It is best to keep redirects to a minimum or, if possible, eliminate them entirely.

Stay on Top of Page Speed Optimization  

There are many factors that could be impacting your site speed at any point in time, which makes it even more important to include page speed optimization as part of your ongoing digital marketing and business goals. Our team at Ecreative can help you navigate the challenging world of site speed. Contact us today for assistance with website speed optimization.