Site Loading Speed – How is It Useful for Optimizing a Website?

Website Loading Speed
Since 2010 Google has announced that site loading speed has a significant impact on the website's ranking, in simple terms, site loading speed refers to the total time required to display all the contents of a website and includes the time required to access different pages on that website. According to Google’s recent findings, the average site load time for any website is 3 seconds, while it is 7 seconds for E-Commerce websites.

Impact of Site Loading Speed on User Experience (UX) of Your Website

If your website takes more time to load than the above-mentioned averages, then you are at risk of losing approximately 50% of your organic traffic. This is because poor site loading speed has a direct impact on the User Experience (UX) factor of your website. And if you have even a little knowledge about Google’s SEO algorithms, you might be aware that Google doesn’t tolerate even the slightest compromise with UX.

If your UX is poor, your website will be demoted on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings. Thus, it is quite clear that the greater the site loading speed, the lesser will be the organic traffic attracted to your website and vice versa. And to top your problems, a bad UX will ultimately also have a direct impact on your website websites, causing losses.

Thus, Site loading speed has a great significance in optimizing your website for a better user experience.

Factors Contributing to Your Website’s Slow Loading Speed with Solution

There are a lot of factors that directly contribute to slowing down your website’s loading speed. Some of these factors have been listed below:

·         Selection of Cheap Hosting Services

If you’ve chosen cheap hosting services to save costs for your website even if incompatible with the level of your business, then you cannot get good quality hosting services for your website. This will have a direct effect on slowing down your website’s loading speed.

The Solution is to hire only those Hosting services which are compatible with your business level.

·        Insufficient Compensation to Hosting Company

If you’ve chosen the best player in the market to provide hosting services to your website, but you have defaulted or legitimately refused to pay the compensation deserved by the company, the company will rightfully lower the quality of hosting services to your website.

·        Media Embedded from an external source 

If your website has video audio embedded from some external source, it will take a lot of time to load.

Instead, you can try hosting the media on your server itself.

·        Large images

If images that take excessive time to load, i.e. images of the format JPEG and logos, are present on your website, then it will undoubtedly slow down your website's loading speed.

Instead, to avoid this problem use the PNG format of images wherever possible.

·        Excessive Advertisements

If your website has been bombarded with loads of different Ads, it will lag your website for the users.

Minimize the quantum of Ads displayed on your website to avoid this problem.

·        Hyphenated Code 

If your website’s HTML or CSS code is hyphenated or too dense, it has a direct impact on the efficiency of your website. If your website is inefficient, it means it will take too much time to load.

As a solution, use a simple HTML/CSS Code for your website to ensure optimum efficiency.

Tools You Can Use to Review & Improve Your Site's Loading Speed

Following are some important tools you can use to optimize your website’s loading speed:

·        WP Rocket Plugin

WP Rocket is the best WordPress plugin that speed-up your website instantly and helps you to fix any WordPress performance disputes that increase your website loading speed. It also delivers fast loading times whether you are a learner or a performance proficient. This tool is renowned as the most influential caching plugin by WordPress professionals.

·        Page Speed Insights 

Page Speed Insights provides your website a score ranging from 0 to 100 based on your website’s loading speed. It does assess not only your website's speed but also analyses your website’s User Experience (UX). Apart from that, this tool also provides you with a detailed summary of keys and advice to optimize your website.

·        Webpage Test

This tool doesn't provide you with any ordinal results of speed tests, but instead, it provides you with graphs and charts of your website’s performance for competitive analysis.

·        YSlow Plugin

As mentioned in the problems above, one of the major problems which can affect your website’s loading speed is the density or complexity of your HTML/CSS code.  This YSlow plugin assists you in compressing your website’s HTML/CSS code to ensure optimum performance efficiency and loading speed.

Google’s Aggressive Approach towards the Significance of Your Website’s Loading Speed

·         Accelerated Mobile Page

This is Google's recently introduced process which ensures lightning-fast rendering of the results page and content delivery after users input search results across all types of devices, be it mobiles or desktops. This shows that Google has a positive intent for faster loading speed for users. Not only that, but Google also uses its cloud for the caching of the memory of all these search results.

·        Google Fiber

Google Fiber provides a fast and robust internet speed for all users. It is Google's yet another means to achieve sound execution of something called the Internet Of Things. It promises faster and more accurate content delivery among the masses. When Google Fiber will be installed by all the general users, and when gigabit is considered as standard, that is Google's ultimate goal to achieve for the internet.

·         Google's Guidelines for Developers 

Google’s developer guidelines mandate a response time of 200 milliseconds and a web page load time of one second for all developers.  This is another one of Google's classic indications of backing fast loading time for your website. 

There are several prominent SEO companies that you can approach to resolve your website’s slow loading issues. They will provide you with all the necessary guidelines and assistance required for optimizing your website’s loading speed, UX, etc.

Conclusion

Thus you are now familiar with the concept of website loading speed, and the problems responsible for slowing down your website’s loading speed such as Large size Images, external embedded media, excessive ads, etc. You now also know that Google’s intent is positive towards faster content delivery and results rendering to the users because its algorithms, guidelines, and processes all point towards the same. Ultimately it is important to improve your website loading speed to optimize it for the users.



Gangadhar Kulkarni

Gangadhar Kulkarni is an internet marketing expert and consultant having extensive experience in digital marketing. He is also the founder of Seogdk and Director at DigiTechMantra Solutions, a one-stop shop for all that your website needs. It provides you cost-effective and efficient content writing and digital marketing services.

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