Users can simply wait, drink a cup of coffee, surf some other websites, and then get back to you when your website has been completely loaded. Well, let’s be totally upfront about it. They absolutely won’t wait more than 4 seconds! If your website is loaded within this time, they might show some interest in visiting it; if not, you’ve lost the chance and they will skip to the next fast loading website.
According to Google Web Fundamentals, it was found that websites loading within 5 seconds had 70% longer sessions, 35% lower bounce rates, and 25% higher ad viewability than websites taking nearly four times longer than 19 seconds.
Performance is about improving conversions.
If you want to check how well your website is performing, you can use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to both realize the overall performance of your website and detect the issues that slow your website down.
Resolving the issues you have seen on Google is our expertise at Sitka Digital. You may go ahead and check our own website’s speed. If you are convinced of how fast it loads, you may want to trust us to make yours catch up.
There is also another tool to check your website speed; GTmetrix. Through this tool, you have some more options available than those of PageSpeed Insights.
You can compare your website performance with that of the others. Also, you will see a detailed analysis of each item on your website score. There will then be solutions to resolve those that have a B or fewer grades.
You can see what reduces your website speed as well. Whatever that is that slows your website down must be something that needs an advance analysis by professionals.
Let’s discuss some items that reduce your website speed:
Having launched your website, you submit an XML sitemap to Google. Your website will be crawled with irregular timelines by Google bots in order to be indexed. What Google bots do to index your website is called rendering.
Within this process, some issues on your website will block proper rendering, and as a result, increase your website loading time. Removing the render-blocking issues will help Google bots crawl your website with fewer problems, and improve your rankings.
These issues may contain some JavaScript, CSS or server related items. We know our onions about resolving all of them.
Images used on different occasions are usually in JPG, JPEG, or PNG formats. Google, nonetheless, views WebP as the “next-generation format” and gives it credit way more than the other image formats.
WebP has a smaller size than JPG and PNG formats. Interestingly enough, the quality of images would be exactly the same after compressing and converting it into WebP.
Using images in WebP format helps your website to load faster. Although it still may not be supported by some browsers, search engines are making their browsers compatible with this format and they are all going to support it in the near future. Images on your website are then recommended to be in WebP format.
Since you know what CSS is, you may have added some styles while developing your website. But as per required modification, you have not used them all and some of them have remained unused. As these styles have already been read by Google crawlers, your website’s loading time will increase. In order to decrease it, you should remove those unused CSS’s.
There are many other speed reducers mentioned on Google PageSpeed or GTmetrix. Ask us, and we will discuss them with you in detail.
As elucidated earlier, AMP-lifying your website can also help the mobile version load almost instantly. This lies within the scope of our service in the web development section.
By doing a simple online search, you will find more than a million websites discussing how fast loading websites can improve your rankings, conversion rate, sales, traffic, and also reduce the bounce rate. We now think you have enough reasons to hire someone who is able to speed up your website and help you gain all of the above.
Contact our Canada office, and talk to our young team members. We will answer the questions you may have ASAP.
