It’s time to speed up your website

Everybody likes to surf the internet, but when we find a website that doesn’t load in an instant, we become easily annoyed. Most of us choose to leave that website for an alternative one. According to experts, 47% of users expect a site to load very fast, and when that doesn’t happen they tend to leave it. This simply translates in conversions decrease. Amazon discovered that for every one second delay, conversions dropped by 7%. So, that’s not good.

Google states that the acceptable time of loading a website page is from 500 milliseconds to a maximum of 2 seconds.

Pingdom, a website speed checker tool, has given the following statistics of websites that used their platform for speed tests in 2016:

• Average load time: 5 seconds
• Average page size: 3Mb
• Average number of images: 42
• Average number of JavaScripts: 21
• Average number of http requests: 89

These statistics shows us that most of the websites out there aren’t yet fully optimised for site speed. So, now is the time to speed up your website.

Start by choosing an efficient hosting company. Optimising your website is not enough if you are on a server that isn’t suitable for the traffic you receiving or the performance you need. So, choose a hosting provider that does perform, because this has a huge impact on your site speed.

Now, you can begin to optimise your website. Start doing this by making sure all your images are properly compressed and by ensuring you are using the right image format (photographs work better as JPEGs whereas flat colour graphics should be PNGs). You can also use other optimisation techniques, like avoid plugins where possible, optimise your fonts, utilise browser caching or reduce feature testing.

When all that optimisation is done, test your speed site to see how your website is performing and where you can do some improvements. Google‘s PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom or WebPageTest are just some of the many tools available out there.

Tags :  hosting,  speed,  website