Website speed is key to user
experience, so if your site is slow, there is no reason to keep it that way.
What's the use of getting traffic from search engines, when your visitors have
to hang for 10+ seconds before they can see your content – they will have left
much before the page has loaded.
If you want to improve website
speed, there are a couple of steps to be taken. First, you need to measure your
website speed – otherwise how do you know it's slow?
In order to measure load times, you
need a good tool. The choice here is quite rich. Pingdom Page Load Time tool
and Google Analytics Site Speed reports give a good idea of your site's general
performance. WebPageTest is a more advanced tool because it allows to test your
site in different browsers and spot slow areas on your site.
One of the obvious reasons a site is slow is that the server
you are hosting it on is slow. The reasons here could be numerous – from a web
hosting provider that lacks the capacity to offer fast servers, to the type of
your hosting account.
Your
server might be fast but if your site itself is slow, you will still experience
speed issues. If your code and images are not optimized for fast loading, you
won't see speed improvements till you fix them. This task could take a very,
very long time, especially if your code and images are bloated but you've got
to do it. For images, you can use compression and/or smaller sizes. This will
speed loading big time. For HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other Web languages
there are tons of tricks (and tools) how to optimize your code.
The
bigger problem with slow sites is that they are not user–friendly, which in
turn kills conversions. If you don't want to lose money because of the speed
issues of your site, take the time to fix them – it will pay in the long run.
