Website speed is incredibly important for all users. Sites that load fast perform better on all fronts as they are able to provide better user experience, more engagement, higher conversion rate and a higher search ranking. If you are after a higher mobile traffic, the speed of the website because it increases the number of pages downloaded and displayed on the web browser of the user. No user would like to download a 4MB site on their smartphone but unfortunately, most websites are designed this way. However, you can make your website a little lighter and faster to load.
How Fast Is a Fast Website?
While an average of 1 second may appear to be a good loading speed for a website, a website that loads under 7 seconds may also be considered fast. However, if the loading time is more than 10 seconds, you may be losing money in noticeable quantities. So, when considering website speed, one should take in account the perceptions and expectations of the user and the possibilities of peak traffic problems. Users will be tempted to move to alternative sites that are faster and will abandon a page that appears to take more than 3 seconds to load.
Website users have a given tolerable waiting time that is required to retrieve information – an average of 2 seconds. However, additional feedback such as the progress bar may push the tolerable waiting time to 40 seconds. There are various ways that you can use to make your website faster and simpler to load. However, the most important thing to remember is that fast websites encourage users to visit and also have a higher chance of achieving transactions (if their core purpose is eCommerce).
Website Speed Optimization
In an effort to improve the search rank of a website, speed is a major consideration. Website speed can be increased by hosting the media files on a content delivery network (CDN) thus saving 60% of bandwidth and the number of requests made by your network. CDNs host millions of files for large networks of servers in the world and regardless of the locations you access the website from, the files are downloaded from the server closest to you. This reduces the workload of any single server and also protects the site from potential attacks and traffic spikes.
Another way that website speed can be enhanced is through the use of caching plugins. If your website is using WordPress, installing a caching plugin such as WP Total Cache or WP Super Cache increases the website’s loading speed. These plugins can be downloaded and they have additional functions besides browser caching. However, if you are using WP Engine, this step can be skipped because the engine has a caching built-in. Browser caching can also be added without a plugin to improve page speed.
Website Speed And Rating
Nobody likes using a slow website because it wastes time and resources. Website speed tests are built to analyze the loading time of each website and help the developer in making the site faster. Tools such as Pingdom helps the user in identifying the popularity of a web page, size, speed and what best practices to follow when developing the website. These tools also provide both experts and novices with web development options for performance optimization.