Have
you ever been frustrated by a website that takes eternity to load?
Let’s consider this scenario: You are in the middle of a research. You
need to quickly fill in some information for the presentation you have.
You fire up your computer, click on Google and type in your keyword
phrase. Ten website results are returned to you on a single page. You
click the first position and wait for over five minutes for it to load.
Wait! Did I say wait? No. You watch it
for some few seconds, hit the return button on your browser and click
the next result. That precisely is what people do when they go on the
Internet and visit a web page.
With the amount of information readily
available on the Internet, website speed becomes a very important
factor. The faster your website loads, the more people that visit your
webpage. The slower your website loads, the more traffic you lose to
your competitors.
Even the search engine giant, Google, will display a website with lower page speed load time than one that takes longer to load.
Your website speed is part of the
performance metric that you should measure and pay particular attention
to every time. This becomes more important as people access websites
from different devices and use different Internet connections.
How can you improve upon your website speed?
Optimise your images
Images on your website are one of the
most important reasons why your website may take a longer time to load.
Except if you are in the entertainment industry, it is advisable to
reduce the amount of images on your website. While having images adds
beauty to your website, you should try to reduce their usage. Your home
page might have all the images necessary to attract your web visitors,
but as users drill down into your web pages, they want information and
not aesthetics. Therefore, having only one or two optimised images to
boost your website ranking is good enough.
Responsive web design
Billions of searches are done on a daily
basis and most of these searches are from mobile devices and tablets.
Mobile devices and tablets will display websites that are compatible
with mobile browsers. The argument then is: Should you go with
developing a separate version of your website for mobile devices
popularly known as mobile apps and a separate version for desktops? The
choice is yours, but having two separate versions of your website means
you pay more to your application developers and the cost of maintenance
doubles.
If you also have to make an update, you
have to come up with two different versions of your update. However, you
can avoid all of these issues by having a responsive website design —
RWD. An RWD will ensure that your website displays the same way, no
matter what device it is accessed from.
Latest technology
Is your website up to date? Did you
design your website in 2002? Technology changes very fast, and so also
do the browsers that bring your website to your clients. Upgrading your
website to use the latest trend might make a big difference in how long
it takes it to load.
Page content
When it comes to page content, lot of
confusion arises. Do we cram all our information into the page or
separate them? Remember, on the Internet, things are markedly different
from offline situations. People’s attention span is very short and there
are lots of other resources they can use to get the same type of
information. You therefore want to keep your web visitors on your
website as long as possible for them to take the actions you want.
Therefore on the web, less is more. If
possible, once your webpage contents reach above 1,000 word count, you
might start thinking of creating additional pages. Also, if you have
less than 300 words on a webpage, you should start thinking of adding
more to it. This is because Google will see the webpage as too “lean”
and therefore may remove it from its SERP.
Separate scripts
Another factor that can actually slow
down your webpage is the amount of information it needs to load before
it displays the information necessary for that particular page. HTMl,
CSS, JavaScript and Server Scripts are sometimes necessary part of your
Webpage.
And all these needs to be loaded to
display your website very well and load the applications on your
website. They may add to the time it takes before the website loads,
thus reducing your web speed.
Calling your scripts from external
sources ensures that only the relevant and important ones are called up
whenever they are needed and this ensures that your webpage loads
faster.
By making these adjustments to your
website, you can create a great experience for your users and it might
mean the difference between that customer calling you or calling your
competitor. So, take a free test today: Use either the Google Speed test
tools or try Pingdom.
by Akeem Baiyewu (akeem@akeem.net @acmakeem
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