How Fast does Your Site Load?
Page Speed
In the early days of the internet most people gained access via a dial-up modem and so sites needed to load fast. A few years on, broadband became the norm and you could fill your site with lots of resource heavy pictures & videos and it didn't matter.
Fast forward to today and the
majority of visitors to your site will be using a mobile device, maybe
connected via 3G or 4G and with a monthly data cap or using public wi-fi
with a speed equivalent of 2G.
Is your site suitable for this
change of use?
Most sites will load pretty quickly when the
user is on broadband but what about when they're (increasingly) not?
The place
to start your checks is:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Enter the URL
of your home page and select 'Analyze' then 'Mobile' and look at your score,
then compare it to 'Desktop'. You can then do the same with other pages
in your site.
You will receive a report on what's slowing up delivery
of your site together with advice on what to do about it.
One of the
biggest delays is having a YouTube video embedded on your page. This will
slow down the loading time even if the visitor doesn't watch it.
The
solution here is to use 'Lazy Load'. Instead of the video being loaded
automatically, a selected image is shown along with the 'Play' button. The video
and associated coding is only downloaded if the 'Play' button is pressed.
On one of our sites adding this feature alone changed the 'Mobile Score'
from 65 to 94! There are a number of coding options available to achieve
this (search YouTube Lazy Load) or take a look at the coding on our
home
page to see how we did it.
Other 'quick-fix' options include using 'next-gen'
picture formats (JPEG 2000, JPEX XR and WebP) which have superior
compression without losing quality. You can easily convert your images
either from an on-line resource (try
https://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-webp) or image software
(be aware though that these newer formats don't work in all browsers).
Finally, moving just the required CSS and JS from external folders
directly into the page where they are required will speed things up (we did
this on a JS heavy page and it improved the score from 67 to 91).
Making these changes will give you 2 benefits:
1. Google uses 'Page
Speed' as part of its algorithm to determine where you rank in the search
results.
2. If your pages are fast to load then there's a far better chance that
the visitor will stay on your site.