Page Load Speed and Why It Matters

Page load time is the time a website takes to load all its content. Basic the definition, huge is its importance! Why? Internet today relies on how fast people get what they want. If they had time, then there would have been no need to go wireless, there would have been no internet.

The above graph shows how your audience is going to react if your website takes time to load. Stats provided by Radware and Web Performance Today give you an insight of how it all comes together.

Means, if an online store is making $500,000 per day, then 1 second delay can actually cost the owner $12.5 million worth of loss for one single year.

Pagespeed Vs Sitespeed

The time a website takes is measured in two ways. Pagespeed is the time taken to load all the content for the first time. Sitespeed is the time taken to respond to a web request, it could be any web request. People often confuse these two with each other. They are very different in approach. However, sitespeed is a more general term giving an idea about performance of an entire website. To improve the sitespeed, pagespeed is an important factor to focus on.

Why does pagespeed matter?

Loading time of a website is an arrow that targets two aims at a single shot. One is Search Engine Optimization and the other is User Experience.

Search Engines like Google have at least a dozen of criteria to determine how efficient a website is. When I say efficient, time is an inseparable quantity. No matter, how advanced your online store is, if it doesn’t load quickly then it serves very little purpose in terms of conversion. Hence, it becomes difficult to achieve good ranking.

Pagespeed is one of the many criteria to measure efficiency in terms of SEO. But when we are talking about user experience, it occupies the front seat. Good user experience holds great importance in SEO, so we have come a full circle. And, it is inevitable for your site to load faster.

How fast should your website be?

The trends and behavior today suggest that people are totally impatient. They expect your website to load very quickly or else they have a lot of other options.

The typical ecommerce website takes 5 seconds to load all the usable content. Studies suggest that people can handle 10 seconds of wait for a website to load. However, with the increasing competition and advancements in technology, this figure is sure to be uncertain.

Hence, we throw some light on the stats that focus on an average online shopper in the next section.

How Website Performance Affects Shopping Behavior?

Loading time is a very important factor for your audience to keep them stuck to your website. Any average user will have no patience. Hence, slower page response time results in page abandonment.

Ahead in the article, we discuss what you can do to make your pages load faster.

Tips to improve loading speed of your website

Though the situation demands websites to take less time to load, you cannot compromise with versatility. So here are some sure fire ways you can adapt to make sure that time is never a factor to drive your public away.

Choose you web hosting carefully

The server you choose for hosting should be capable enough to handle the traffic at the peak hours of being visited. If it is not designed to handle a lot of web requests, some or all people won’t be able to access your website at the moment.

Optimize Images

How many times have you come across an infographic article that didn’t even load? Personally, I cannot handle so much torture. The page that loads data quickly but hasn’t loaded images yet looks unmanaged. And by the definition, time taken to load “all” the content determines pagespeed. Image optimization compresses images maintaining their basic quality so that images load faster than usual.

Caching is your best solution

Browser Caching is a browser specific activity. Browser saves website’s user determined data for further use. The main aim of caching is to improve pagespeed. When a user visits another page on your site, basic stuff like logo and header are loaded from user’s browser and not from your server. And when the user visits your website the second time, caching helps easy and quick loading of website by drawing data from his own browser.

Minify Javascript and CSS

Javascript and CSS are scripting languages mainly to improve the look and feel of your website. They come with their own set of abilities and issues. If not managed carefully and used liberally, both hinder easy loading of a page. So minifying basically means you put all the javascript files in one maine javascript file and all CSS files in one main CSS file.This saves browser from the load of detecting and loading individual files and improves speed.

Compress Javascript and CSS

As mentioned earlier, if these languages are used liberally, they are more a curse than a boon. Another way to reap maximum benefits of these languages without torturing the users with slowly loading pages is, Compress it! What do we exactly mean by compression? It removes unnecessary code, words and comments from the Js and CSS files to make them short and reduce lines of code. Files still retain their original meaning and functionality.

What measures do you take to improve page loading speed for your store? And, how bigger has been its impact on overall performance of your website? Share your views with us and let others know!