Speed is Everything for Websites
Slow, cumbersome websites kill the surfing experience. Google know it, you know and more importantly, your potential visitors know it.
One of the downsides to the modern, instant world that we live in is that none of us has any patience any more…. our ability to wait for anything is diminishing…. and this applies to websites as much as anything else.
The issue for you as a website owner is that many designers don’t pay much heed to performance and instead concentrate of form over function. While many websites look great, they are slow to load and consequently, they never really work online for anyone.
Is Your Website Fast Enough?
The first step is to test your site using Googles speed testing tool. This will highlight how fast google considers your site to be as mobile and PC versions and will also show you how you can potentially speed up your site.
As a rule of thumb, a score of 85 or better is very good, but over 75 will give your site the performance it needs in Google search.
If you need to improve the speed of your website and don’t know where to start, ask a question about your web design & load speed click here
How To Speed up Your Website
Compression
Use Gzip to compress all your web content. It is a widely accepted compression format and so will help your load speed for the majority of users.
In addition compress image file sizes, always use .jpg images rather than .png which are much larger in size. WordPress has many available plugins which will automatically scan and compress all your website images, making a big difference to your website load speed.
Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
A CDN is a network of super fast servers across the world, designed to server your website as fast as possible depending on where the user is, the content they request and the devices used.
A CDN can have a dramatic effect on the delivery speeds for your site.
Minify Files
It’s becoming more and more common to minify files such as javascript and CSS. These are often large files with thousands of lines of code. Even the blank spaces take up code and increase the file sizes, so by removing all the spaces (minification) you shrink the file size making it faster to deliver.
The most important thing as a website owner is that you are aware of your sites current load speed and have taken all the necessary steps to deliver your content as fast as you can.
Google prefers fast loading websites, so for the best opportunities to rank first, be fast.