Google page load speed plays an important part in your websites success. The page load speed impacts the user experience and total number of conversions you ultimately get.
A 1 second delay in page load time results in:
- 11% fewer page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 7% loss in conversions
- 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
- 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
- 52% of online shoppers say quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site.
Here are 3 tips to help improve page load speed
Minimize HTTP Requests
80% of a Web page’s load time is spent downloading the different pieces-parts of the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. An HTTP request is made for each one of these elements, so the more on-page components, the longer it takes for the page to render.
That being the case, the quickest way to improve site speed is to simplify your design.
- Streamline the number of elements on your page.
- Use CSS instead of images whenever possible.
- Combine multiple style sheets into one.
- Reduce scripts and put them at the bottom of the page.
Always remember, when it comes to your website, leaner is better.
Enable compression
Large pages (which is what you could have if you’re creating high quality content) are often 100kb and more. As a result, they’re bulky and slow to download. The best way to speed their load time is to zip them—a technique called compression.
Compression reduces the bandwidth of your pages, thereby reducing HTTP response. According to Yahoo, this can reduce download time by about 70%.
Optimise images
With images, you need to focus on three things: size, format and the src attribute.
Image size
Oversized images take longer to load, so it’s important that you keep your images as small as possible.
- Crop your images to the correct size.
- Reduce color depth to the lowest acceptable level.
- Remove image comments.
Image format
- JPEG is your best option.
- PNG is also good, though older browsers may not fully support it.
- Do not use BMPs or TIFFs.
Src attribute
Once you’ve got the size and format right, make sure the code is right too. In particular, avoid empty image src codes.
In HTML, the code for an image includes this:
<img src=””>
When there’s no source in the quotation marks, the browser makes a request to the directory of the page or to the actual page itself. This can add unnecessary traffic to your servers and even corrupt user data.
Some of these tips are easy to implement, but a few are advanced tactics that can be intimidating if you aren’t technically inclined.