Why should my website be fast?
A lightweight fast website means your pages load quickly. Your website visitors are coming to your website to find out about you or your services or products. The information you provide to them however, must be accompanied by a good user experience. If this isn’t the case, they will go elsewhere.
Nobody wants to wait for a web page to load. We all have busy lives and our attention span is growing ever shorter. So, it makes sense that fast loading sites will have higher conversion rates. Conversions can range from enquiries to downloads or even direct sales and everything in between.
If your web pages take more than a couple of seconds to load, you can be guaranteed that you will be losing visitors. You should always be striving to have a website faster then your competitors. A website that takes an age to load or an online shop that runs at a snail’s pace is a waste of your money and time. Competitors with faster websites will take your business away from you. It’s that simple!
Look at it from Google’s perspective. Google is the business of making recommendations. It’s all that Google does. Why would they recommend a website that offers their clients a poor experience? …especially if there is a better option! Put simply, they just wouldn’t. It would reflect badly on them. That is why slow websites are buried deep on pages two or three (or worse) of Google’s search pages.
If you want your website to work for you, it has to be quick! Period.
How do I test my website for speed?
There are a number of free and premium speed testing services online. A good place to start is with Googles’s own Page Speed Insights. This will give you an idea of how quickly your web pages are loading on mobile devices and on desktop computers. Arguably it is most important to look at is the mobile results because that is how Google now ranks websites. They do this because more searches on Google are carried out on mobile devices than on desktop computers.
You should be aiming for a performance rating in the 90 to 100 bracket. The results are informative too. Clicking through them will give you good explanations of where improvements can be made. You can try the basics yourself, like reducing image file sizes and removing unused fonts or font weights. If your site is still slow, it might be time to seek advice. You are welcome to call us on 021 807 497 or get in touch by using out contact form:
Optimise your images
Size
One thing to do is make sure that the images you upload are no bigger than they need to be. A rule of thumb that I work to is that if an image is only going to fill half the width of a page, it needn’t be any wider than 900 pixels.
File Formats
Another way to make image file sizes smaller is to use next-gen formats like WebP and AVIF which provide better compression than PNG or JPG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption. Read more about these modern image formats here.
If you don’t have software that saves images in these new formats, don’t worry, there are plenty of free online file conversion services available.
Reduce Fonts
Believe it or not, fonts can cause web pages to load slowly too. It is worth checking that your website is not serving up unnecessary fonts or weights of fonts every time a page is loaded. We often find that when a website uses a special font, the designer has loaded all variants of the font; light, light italic, medium, bold etc, when in reality only one weight is being used. Every time your visitor’s browser has to download something before it renders the page, your website is being slowed down.
Insist on quality hosting
It goes without saying that the servers where your website is hosted will play a role in the speed of your website. It’s a false economy to scrimp on hosting. Compare hosts carefully and don’t just take your designer’s word for it. Choose carefully.
Just about anyone with a fast computer and a fibre connection can call themselves a web host. I’ve seen first hand a hosting company in Hawke’s Bay in a room above an auto audio shop. The pennies saved by clients hosting their websites here cost them dearly in lost business. It’s just not worth taking a chance on hosting.
The list goes on
Once these simple changes have been addressed there are still myriad ways of squeezing even more speed from your website. These do however rely on methods that are likely best left to the professionals. If you need help in this area, please give us a call on 021 807 497.