Website Page Load Time: Factors impacting and Tips to improve

In today’s digital age, a website (whether B2B or B2C) is an indispensable part of any organization.

Your website is nothing but a sales person. The better it is, the more business it can give. An informative website, a fast website is akin to a knowledgeable and responsive sales person.

Often businesses invest a lot of time and efforts in building a good looking website with great content but neglect paying too much attention to speed at which it should load. If your website takes ages to load then it’s imperative to attract too much bounce. And an impatient millennial might just switch to your competitor’s website without even the quality of content and offer your website might be running. As a result you lose potential revenue.

Acc. to Google (https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/), the probability of bounce increases 32% as the page loads from 1 to 3 sec.

Not just bounce rate, page speed is one of the most important ranking factor by Google.

Studies show that:

• A one-second delay in page load time yields: a) 11% fewer page views b) 16% decrease in customer satisfaction & c) 7% loss in conversions (Link: https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/speed-up-your-website/ 
• 47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less — and 40% will abandon a page that takes three or more seconds (Link: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/ )
• 79% of customers said they would not return to a site with poor performance (Link: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/speed-is-a-killer/ ). In this same survey, 52% of shoppers said that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty and 44% said they tell their friends about poor site experiences
• 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load (Link: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/ )
• Page load time is one of the key ranking factors as well, google penalizes those sites that take too much time to load thereby leading to loss in our keyword ranks which means our website link might not even show up on the first page of search results. (Link: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2018/01/22/google-speed-update )

Let’s look at some of the factors that affects page load:

• How heavy your page is: The more files you have to load on a page, the longer it will take to load
• No. of plugins or third party scripts you’ve added in your website: If your website is on wordpress then you must be using plugins for various functionalities. The plugins that make a lot of database queries and require a lot of assets to load will slow down your load time.
• Whether your website is hosted on a dedicated or shared server: A shared server can cost you less but will lead to high load time as it has to accommodate for all other websites too. A server dedicated to your website will have a complete control of your resources and will load your site quicker.
• Server location: In an overseas server, the connection must go through many different open networks, so they should consume more time to access
• Browser version: Older browser versions might not be compatible with new features or assets that you modern website has so they may take time to load eventually leading to high page load time

How can you improve website load time

1. Optimize your website images
2. Remove unnecessary or unused third party codes & plugins
3. If possible, go for dedicated hosting
4. Use CDN (content delivery network) - A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a highly-distributed platform of servers that helps minimize delays in loading web page content by reducing the physical distance between the server and the user. This. helps users around the world view the same high-quality content without slow loading time (source: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/cdn/what-is-a-cdn.jsp)
5. Prefer local country host providers

Remember, your goal should be to achieve load time of 0.5 seconds or less.

Keep optimizing !