How fast your website loads today can have a large influence on the user experience, search engine rankings, and, ultimately, success. Crucial information about loading speed insights of page speed issued at a good time, and delivery of web pages are given by recommendations for improvement. This article explores why it is essential to have a good page speed and how to check your current performance, and steps to enhance your page speed. 

The reasons Why Page Speed is Important? 

1. The user experience 

The speed of your site can determine user satisfaction. A fast-loading site, hence, will go ahead to provide a smoother, uninterrupted experience and lessen the bouncing rates. Studies show that 53% of users abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Faster pages ultimately lead to higher user minutes and engagement metrics.  

(Source - Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.7K, Global, March 2016)  

2. Search Engine Optimization  

Google uses page speed as one of the ranking factors, which means websites which are faster will be more likely to place higher in SERPs and win organic traffic. A slow website, on the other hand, can end up with lower rankings, reducing visibility and potential traffic. 

3. Conversion Rates 

Page speed directly influences conversion rates. Research indicates that a one-second delay in page load time can drop the conversion by 26%. That could eat quite a large chunk of profit for an e-commerce site. Faster websites make people complete transactions sign up for services, and interact with the content. 

Source: https://www.akamai.com/site/en/documents/white-paper/how-web-and-mobile-performance-optimize-conversion-and-user-experience-white-paper.pdf 

So how do we measure our page speed? 

Numerous tools are available to evaluate your website's performance, but one of the most popular and extensively applied is Google's PageSpeed Insights. Here is how you can go about it: 

All you have to do is go to PageSpeed Insights , enter your URL and smash that Analyze button. You will be provided. a score out of 100 for both the mobile and desktop versions of your site. It will also categorize your page speed as "Fast," "Average," or “Slow. It will also diagnose the performance issues within 4 categories- Performance, Accessibility, Best practices and SEO 

The tool gives you in-depth suggestions that you can implement to increase your page speed by pointing out specific problems and how you can fix them. 

Example: 

Now let’s say you’re measuring with PageSpeed Insights (or alternatively GT Metrix or Pingdom Tools), you would realize it is scoring 60 on mobile and 75 on desktop. The tool could urge you to prompt optimizations to images, leverage in-browser caching, and reduce server response times for better performance. 

Steps to improve speed of pages 

1. Image Optimization

Large images will slow down your website. Use tools like TinyPNG or Imageoptim to compress and resize the images first without losing quality. Send in the correct file formats: JPEGs for photos, and PNG files for graphics with transparent backgrounds as well as WebP format for a good balance between quality and file size. 

2. Enable browser caching:

This browser caching saves static files on your user's device, and therefore, static resources need not be loaded on every visit. This can be done by editing your website's .htaccess file, or using a plugin if your site is running on WordPress or any other platform. 

3. Reduce HTTP Requests

Decrease the number of HTTP requests on your page. This applies mainly to scripts, images, and CSS files. You can combine those files or use CSS Image sprites to decrease those numbers. 

4. Use a Content Delivery Network

A content distribution network  will spread the content of your website to multiple servers in different countries, enabling users to download resources from the nearest server. This can significantly scale download times for global audiences. 

5. Optimize response time of servers

Slow server response times can bottleneck your website's performance. Choose a reliable hosting provider, optimize your database and use efficient server side scripts to enhance the response times. 

6. Minify the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

Minify your code by removing unneeded characters, spaces, and comments—you will reduce the size of your files. There are tools like UglifyJS that might help you automate the process.  

7. Implement Lazy Loading  

Lazy loading is when you defer the loading of non-critical resources until they must be executed. For example, you can load images and videos just when they are in the viewport, which shortens the initial load time of the whole document.

8. Minimize Redirecting 

Every redirect creates one more HTTP request for the new location. Avoid the use of redirects when possible, and make existing redirects more efficient if they have to be used.

Now how important the page speed really is and how can we improve it with a/b tests? - a real world example of  HSBC's Page Load Optimization Test 

The world's leading bank and financial services company, HSBC, ran a test on their in-house Asian Pacific website to reduce loading time on pages that would increase conversion rates.The new variation addressed the loading speed by removing redirect links and also changed the layout. The increased page speeed in this case also lead  a huge 91.6%  increase in conversions for CTRs. This research validated the importance of optimization of the layout of the page and speed of loading the web page to influence user experience and conversions in a positive way. 

 Link - https://guessthetest.com/test/which-format-improved-page-load-times-and-conversions/?referrer=A 

In Conclusion Page speed matters for enhanced user experience, increased conversion rates, and high rankings by search engines. Make regular checks of page speed with tools such as PageSpeed Insights and regular optimization recommendations implementation to up your website performance. It is crucial to Make optimization of webpage speed a continuous work like other regular website maintenance practices.  

Contact us At Echologyx and we would be more than happy to work with you on optimizing your website in improving the loading times. We are equipped to identify the problems and offer the solutions as well as make the alterations necessary to enhance page speed and improve the rankings within search engines.