How can you optimise your website’s speed? Find out more.

The speed of a website makes a first impression about your company. This means that it’s important to understand that you won’t get another chance when it comes down to user experience.  Slow website speed is one of the most annoying things which will turn people off about the site.

“If you don’t believe us,” says Marc Schneider: chief operations officer at the Digital School of Marketing, “have a look at the stats.” A website that loads slower than its competitors results in:

• 11% fewer page views,
• 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, as well as
• 7% loss in conversions.

This means that a few extra seconds could have a massive impact on the website’s ability to engage visitors and – as a consequence – make sales.

High-performing website result in:

• Higher numbers of return visits,
• Lower bounce rates,
• Higher conversions as well as engagement,
• Higher ranks in organic search, in addition to
• Improved user experience.

Slow websites will cost you money as well as a damaged reputation. By decreasing the page load time you will positively affect marketing as well as sales processes. You’ll get higher traffic and attract more qualified leads that can be converted into customers.

Website page speed in addition to performance is very important to the experience that the user has of your website. If your website is too slow, you’ll not only be losing visitors but potential customers in addition. Search engines such as Google take a website’s speed into account in search rankings. This means that you optimise your website’s speed, you should take everything into consideration. Every millisecond plays a part.

How to speed up your website

Minimise HTTP requests

Eighty per cent of a Web page’s load time is spent on downloading the various parts of the page, such as images, stylesheets as well as scripts. An HTTP request is done for each one of these elements. This means that the more on-page components a web page has, the longer it takes for the page to render.

The primary step that you are required to take in order to minimise your requests is to determine out how many your website makes at the moment so that you can use this  a benchmark.

Minimise and combine files

Once you know the number of requests that your site makes, it is possible for you to get to work on reducing that number. The best place to begin is with your HTML, CSS as well as JavaScript files. These are very vital files because they define your site’s appearance and add to the number of requests your website makes every time a user visits it.

Use asynchronous loading for CSS as well as JavaScript files

Optimise the manner in which these files load on your pages. Scripts such as CSS as well as JavaScript can be loaded in two diverse ways: Synchronously or Asynchronously:

• If your scripts load in a synchronous fashion, these load one at a time in the order that they appear on the page.
• However, if your scripts load in an asynchronous fashion, some of these will load simultaneously.

Loading files asynchronously can accelerate your pages as when a browser loads a page, it moves from top to the bottom. If a browser gets to a CSS or JavaScript file which is not asynchronous, it will cease loading until it has completely loaded that specific file. If that same file was asynchronous, the browser could continue with loading other elements on the web page at the same time.

“Your site speed,” concludes Schneider, “is a vital part of your SEO. ”

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

To master other parts of SEO strategy, it is absolutely essential that you do our SEO and Web Analytics Course. For more information on this course or any of our other Digital Marketing courses, please follow this link.”