Page loading time is an important part of any site’s user experience. It can often facilitate better aesthetic design, functionality and content. Because people want faster sites, Google and other search engines do as well. To be more effective and keep visitors on your site longer, it is important to have a site that not only loads properly, but quickly. A few seconds can make a huge difference, in fact:
- Most users expect a site to load in two seconds or less and can even abandon a site that isn’t loaded within three seconds.
- Website visitors tend to care more about speed than any flashy bells and whistles like animation.
- Page loading is becoming increasingly important when it comes to search engine rankings.
So, what do you do to ensure a quick loading speed?
At WebDrafter, we take care of this for you! There are many different ways in which we make sure your site is loading as it should. The first one deals with file sizes and images. Our goal is to optimize and compress. We don’t include any unnecessary animations or GIFs for the sake of it and ensure all images are compressed as to not affect the loading of your site. Now, most teams do not have a person dedicated to image resizing and compression; but we do! Before any new page is created, great care goes into ensuring images do not exceed their optimal size.
But size is only half the story. It also takes time for a request to reach a server. And then it takes time for the server to respond. It’s simple; when a user types a URL into a browser address bar and hits enter, a request is made. Lots of things happen when that request is made. The very last part of that is transferring the requested content and what is ultimately affected by bandwidth and the size of the content. Unfortunately, network signals can’t travel faster than the speed of light. But this is where the strength of the server comes in. Our job is to reduce the time it takes for the request to reach the server.
How are you doing?
Programs like PageSpeed Insights can be useful in finding out where your site stands. But remember, a high score doesn’t necessarily guarantee a faster site. It looks at a variety of factors including compression server response time, etc. That’s why we have in-house programmers that monitor site speed and work to keep things functioning as they should.  The content management systems we use, like WordPress, have plugins that will cache the latest version of your pages and display it to so that the browser isn’t forced to go dynamically generate that page every single time.
Should you panic about your load time affecting your Google rankings?
In short, no. Optimizing page load time is a smart thing to do to help visitors get where they’re going faster, but is not the only factor that goes into rankings. But, it should be considered for ranking purposes and most importantly for user experience. In the end, if your site is slow, people will leave your site to go elsewhere and your bounce rate will go up. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages and this could negatively impact your ranking.
Interested in learning more about how site speed can help your business? Quick! Give us a call and we can tell you all about it and answer any questions you might have.
