Why Website Speed Matters?
Back in 2008 comedian Louis C.K. appeared on Conan O’Brien’s talk show to vent about people’s reactions to technological advances:
“Now we live in an amazing, amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots, because this is what people are like now—they’ve got their phone, and they’re like, ‘Uhh, it won’t . . . .’ Give it a second! It’s going to space! Can you give it a second to get back from space?”
Louis C.K. isn’t wrong. 60 years ago, the first computer took up 1,800 square feet and weighed around 50 tons. Now you can wear a more functional computer on your wrist. Technology is amazing.
However, your average customer is likely part of this generation that has become accustomed to new and improved technology. Everything needs to work well. Everything needs to work fast, especially online.
Around 50% of people expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, and about 80% won’t return to a website if it didn’t load fast enough. Because people perform more searches on mobile devices than desktop computers, it is just as, if not more, important that your pages load quickly.
In this blog post, we’ll review the reasons why your webpages aren’t loading as fast as they could be and the tools you can use to check website speed.
Why Is My Website Loading Slowly?
A website could load slowly for several reasons, including time-consuming coding (like Javascript), undefined or unformatted images, outdated plugins, and slow servers.
Each website has different reasons and specifics for being slow. The best way to improve your website’s load times is to fix the specific problems of your website.
Luckily, there are several tools that will test your website’s load time and issues you can fix. The times and suggestions vary from tool to tool. Using them all will give you a good idea of the main problems and issues.
Pingdom
Pingdom is a free tool that tests your website’s speed from several server locations, gives it a grade, and gives a list of suggestions to speed up the website. I like using Pingdom most for the load time it presents. I feel like it is the most accurate out of the all the website speed test tools. The sever locations are a nice bonus and allow you to test from several spots in America and a couple of foreign locations as well.
GT Metrix
GT Metrix is another free tool that also gives the page a score along with suggestions on issues that you need to f I use GT Metrix mostly for its pagespeed suggestions. It outlines and categories and gives specific examples of what is slowing down the website. Sometimes the page load time is slower than the actual load time.
Google’s offers a free tool called PageSpeed Insights that gives a score for both mobile and desktop rendering with suggestions on issues you need to fix. Because most of you are trying to rank high in Google it is nice to see how Google views the website. Plus it gives specifics to help improve both the desktop and mobile renderings of the website.
AMP
Once you resolve the issues you discover from the first three tools, you can use AMP to further speed up your website’s loading times.
Search engines recognized the need for fast-loading pages and created an open source code called AMP (Accelerate Mobile Pages). AMP is a simplified, standardized code that helps pages load quicker on mobile devices. These pages are created in addition and conjunction to the existing pages on your website. Basically an AMP page is a copied version of the same page on the website, but with a simplified code and format that loads faster.
Your visitors expect a website that loads quickly. If they do not get a fast-loading website, your visitors will leave and visit your competition instead. As technology continues to improve and make things quicker, users will continue to expect information to be delivered quickly and succinctly.
You absolutely need to correct issues with page speed if you notice any. Use the listed tools to start working on any issues. If you know of any other tools that measure page speed and give good insights, comment below.
