13.01.2023

<h1>Everything you need to know about the speed of your website</h1>

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A quick website is a pleasant website, we can all agree on that. But what makes a quick website a pleasant website? And how do decrease your loading times? In this blog teach you all the ins and outs about website speed and how to get your website faster than light!

A quick website is important because…

Speed plays a major role in the conversion rate and user experience of your website. In addition, Google nowadays takes the speed of your website into account when ranking the search results. Fast websites – on desktop and on mobile devices – are rewarded with a higher position in Google. How this is exactly calculated is, as is often the case with Google, not entirely clear. As a rule of thumb: things that are good for your users are important to Google. A quick website is obviously one of those things. 

User Experience

For a visitor to your website, speed is extremely important. You don’t like to wait, neither do your visitors. Does your website take longer than 3 seconds to load? Then we are gone without any action taken. A slow website equals annoyance and this is reflected online in higher bounce rates and shorter website visits. A fast website helps to improve the user experience of your website.

Conversions

Let’s not beat around the bush; the slower a page loads, the more likely it is that a potential customer will bounce. This is especially true with web shops where a slow loading time has many financial consequences. In fact; a 1 second delay can already realize a conversion loss of up to 7%. Google agrees with a self-conducted study from 2020 in which the relationship between loading time and conversion rate has been mapped out. The results? Reducing mobile website load times by just 1/10th of a second has a major positive impact on the conversion rate. Within the retail sector, conversion rates increased by 8.4% and travel websites saw an increase of more than 10.1% in sales.

Google & SEO

We just talked about the relationship between user experience and loading times. That same user experience is the driving factor behind Google. The slower a website is, the worse the user experience of the visitor is. For Google as well, after all, they offer a bad choice to begin with. For that reason, Google actively ranks fast websites higher in search results than websites that have longer loading times. 

In 2021, Google introduced the Core Web Vitals – consisting of interactivity, stability and, as just mentioned, loading performance. The most important metric in loading performance mainly revolves around the ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ (LCP). The LCP gives a score of how long it takes for the main content block of the website to load. The focus being on content above the fold. That means the LCP can be anything; think of a video, slider or a large text block. We understand that this may be a bit short-sighted for some of you, but there is enough information to dedicate an entire blog on this topic. That’s why you can find all the details in this article about Google’s Largest Contentful Paint.

Long story short: the longer it takes for your website to load the LCP, the lower your score. A good score means a loading speed of about 2.5 seconds. Above 4 seconds is insufficient and there is real work to be done. You can easily check the LCP via the Google tool: PageSpeed Insight.

Don’t know the loading times of your website yet? Then you probably wonder how it can be measured.

This is how you measure the speed of your website

Fortunately, there are countless (free) tools that allow you to easily measure the loading speed of your website.

  • The most famous one has just been mentioned: PageSpeed Insights from Google. Through which you can see the performance on both desktop and mobile separately! Google also gives tips on optimizations for both versions. Please note: these tips are often very technical and you may need the help of a developer.
  • The Sucuri load time tester: very interesting because it shows the worldwide loading speed of your website per country in one overview.
  • The Pingdom website speed test: the waterfall chart and the Performance Grade tool in particular deserve your attention. Both clearly show which elements on your website slow down certain pages so that you can take appropriate action.
  • In this regard, the GTMetrix tool is a nice one to take a look at. Via GTMetrix you receive a complete insight into the loading times of your website based on two scores; Pagespeed (Google) and Yslow (Yahoo). The measurement also results in a lot of optimisations that you can implement.

Tip: Repeat these tests regularly as there is a good chance that the results will differ per tool. Also, don’t just limit your tests to the homepage. Other conversion-driven pages may deserve just as much attention.

Improving the speed of your website

There are countless ways to do it. But there are three fundamental things you should look at first in our experience.

  1. Choose a hosting partner where website speed, reliability and security are paramount. Managed cloud hosting platforms are emerging and offer the possibility to host your website on a server in your region. Essential for a quick website.
  2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This way you offer your visitors in other regions or even continents a fast website. A CDN is used to place photos, scripts and icons on a server that is geographically as close as possible to the user.
  3. In addition, enable caching on your web server – this will greatly reduce the loading times on your server and will improve the loading time of your website. Caching ensures that the pages of your website are only fully loaded once a day or week. They are then saved as a static HTML page on the server. A returning visitor will then see the previously saved HTML page that as a result will load a lot faster.

Have you got the above things in order? Then you can start optimizing your code and content. Compressing the CSS and Javascript files makes them load faster for the browser. These files consist of endless codes that tell the browser what the website should look like – important for the user experience because a bare website does little for the experience.

Are you dependent on a developer for code? Even then you can get started with the performance of your website. There is often still a lot possible in terms of content. Always edit new images, illustrations or files before adding them to the website. That’s easier than you think. Below you will find the main points of attention.

1.  Use the correct file type

In general, JPG is a good choice, mainly because of the balance between quality and file size. Does your image or illustration contain a transparent background? Often the logo. Then a PNG file type is recommended. Does your website use a lot of illustrations anyway? Then choose to load it as SVG.

You may be thinking “but aren’t there many new file types with better specs?” That’s right, WebP or JPEG2000 are modern file types that are known for their compression techniques. For example, WebP files are about 25% more compact than JPG images. However, this is not always the best choice. These file types are only supported by the latest versions of the most popular browsers. Users using an older browser will see broken images. With the caniuse tool you can check which browser supports which file type.

It is best to make the decision for yourself whether or not to do this, let the data be leading.

2. Choose the correct format

Not every image has to be 5000 pixels wide. In some places where a small image is displayed, a width of 500 pixels is more than enough. An unnecessarily oversized image not only makes your website slow, there is a danger that an image will be cut off in a weird way. Scaling your images to the correct size prevents both.

3. Compress your images

Many photos contain an unnecessary amount of data. By compressing a photo you’ll reduce the file size without losing quality. With this action you improve the speed of your website quickly and easily. Not quite sure how to do this yourself? A well-known tool to compress images is TinyJPG.

Conclusion

The speed of your website equals a pleasant user experience and influences several other aspects positively. But speed isn’t everything! Images, design and JavaScript lower the speed of your website by definition, but it is precisely these elements that ensure conversion and really add something to the experience. Therefore, create a website that contributes to the goal you want to achieve. To do this you will have to weigh several factors out against each other. The speed of your website is only one factor. Just like design and user experience. 

Do you think you need help with the management, optimization or development of your website? With our team of designers, developers and marketers, we have been developing your website for quite some time. We ensure that your website will tick all the right boxes: custom developed, easy to find and with a clear story to tell. We do this with technology that is prepared for changes in the future. Learn more about our services or contact us!

 

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