We all know that having a website that doesn’t run at peak speed is important, but not many of us go through what it takes to actually speed up the process.
Yes, we know you’re probably not running an amazon/facebook/twitter-sized website. But, here are a few incentives to rev things up a bit, even for people who aren’t running massive sites.
I was working though all this on the phone and just decided to make it a post.
1. Visitors Don’t Like it.
Just like you, your visitors don’t like to wait. In cases where your page speed is actually noticeable enough to be affecting user experience, you’ve got a critically bad case of the slows. You need to fix it.
You’ve worked hard to make pages that engage and interest your visitors, but really, you’ve got to do that right away – as soon as they arrive. You only get a few seconds to convince people to stay and interact with you. If your page hasn’t finished loading, you may end up, instead of engaging, with potential customers leaving in droves and the persistent visitors becoming frustrated with you before they’ve even gotten to know you.
It’s just not a good first impression.
2. It can be a sign of a bigger problem.
Sometimes slow loading pages happen because of a bigger problem. Something somewhere is clashing with something else in the code behind your site. And while this may not seem like a big deal, I’ve seen this be the first sign of much bigger problems – looping scripts that cause the server to hang during that critical sale day when the site got surges of traffic.
Don’t you want to be ready to have a huge surge of traffic? An optimized site will survive that day without crashing, helping you achieve a successful outcome. A page with errors causing slow load may actually crash or hang up the server, and that is just a big embarrassing ball of frustration for you as the business owner.
3. It can mean that your stats are inaccurate / interfere with tracking.
If your pages don’t load well and quickly, you may have trouble tracking your web stats (through analytics) accurately or tracking sales (in terms of conversions in paid search marketing). Any time I’ve ever seen tracking code not work, it was from many of the exact same underlying problems that can cause slow page load.
You need to track your visitors in order to properly control your business strategy online. So make sure your data is working properly.
4. Search Engines Don’t Like It.
The search engines don’t like it. I’ve been saying this for 8 years now, and was heavily disagreed with at one point, if you can believe it.
But, now that Google has added the “performance” (page load speed) section to the webmaster zone, no one disagrees with me any more.
Yes. It’s true. The bots have a lot of pages to look at and they won’t stick around to properly gather data on a slow-loading website. They just skip you after a certain time limit has been used up and move on to graze in faster pastures.
So, if you want the search engine spiders to crawl your site from top to bottom, get your site so that it makes their job easier. Don’t slow them down while they’re working to help give you exposure online. For free. Cut them some slack.
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So what does speeding up my page do?
First effect of speeding up the site is fewer bounces – as long as your content is good. If you’ve improved page load time and your bounce rate doesn’t improve, work on making your content more interesting and relevant to the searcher’s needs.
If you speed up page load time, it should also improve the average number of pages per visitor. People are more willing to click around if you haven’t made them wait.
The next effect is that more of your pages may make it into search, giving your site more visibility overall. Again, this depends on whether your content is good, focused, and whether your pages are otherwise search engine friendly.
Your stat tracking for visitors may improve in accuracy as well.
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What are some ways to speed things up? From this point forward, web-savvy people only, please. (If you’re not a techie, my advice is to fetch yourself a techie and make him do this for you.)
1. Server check. Make sure you’re on a robust server. First things first. Can your server go quickly if it wants to? If not, upgrade your site’s hosting or change hosts.
2. Validate. Make sure all your scripts are valid, all your styles are valid, all pages are valid – EVERYTHING. This means written following standards – without any wonky bits that take time to try to resolve or work around…
3. Externalize. If something that is on every page of the site doesn’t have to run in-page, put it in an included file on the same server. And minimize it.
4. Localize. Self-host every script that you don’t have to grab from another 3rd party website. The ideal is to have all your files hosted right there with your site. You can self-host almost everything – even things you might think you can’t, like the Google Analytics tracking code.
5. Minimize file size. You can compress scripts and style sheet files. This is one way to speed up page load. I’m not a fan of it personally, but I know many who are. And it’s an easy implementation for some websites.
6. Cache your pages. If you run a site that uses a database to build its pages, and has standard, unchanging pages once made, (such as a blog or a store)Â then you should be using caching. This means the site builds the page, saves a copy and stops asking the database for info every time the page is requested from that point on. It speeds up response time on the server by getting rid of a few – possibly long – requests that you’d otherwise have to send the server per page visited.
Word of warning – check with your hosting and software providers whether there is already a plug and play cache in place. Trying to use one system of caching on top of a partial implementation of another system of caching can slow your site down to a frustrating crawl.
7. Pare down your media. If you’re using 7 huge image files on the home page, or you’ve got massive PDFs embedded into your page, take a look at how to streamline those media items. Pretty much any media – images, videos, anything – can be made so that it has a smaller file size, and thus loads faster.
8. Pre-fetch Available in some of the newer technologies emerging for the web, there are possibilities for speeding up page load with kinds of pre-fetching (having the next page get fetched by the server before it gets requested. (In browser use, I see much opportunity for abuse by malware. As a result, it may not become well supported by browsers or implemented at all.) Presumably all it can hypothetically improve is the user experience without any effect on search engine crawl time.
So what does speeding up my page do? First effect of speeding up the site is fewer bounces – as long as your content is good. If you’ve improved page load time and your bounce rate doesn’t improve, work on making your content more interesting and relevant to the searcher’s needs. If you speed up page load time, it should also improve the average number of pages per visitor. People are more willing to click around if you haven’t made them wait. The next effect is that more of your pages may make it into search, giving your site more visibility overall. Again, this depends on whether your content is good, focused, and whether your pages are otherwise search engine friendly. Your stat tracking for visitors may improve in accuracy as well.