Is your website too slow? It is time to take some action to sort out this matter. Even if this is not the case that it might be peculiar to find out the common factors developers make that affects page load time.
Why is page load time most important?
The load time of a page is most important to directly relate to the website’s perceived performance, when it comes to the website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load and you will lose half of your visitors before they even arrive on your website.
1. Visibility
Google examines that the page load time when ranking your website in search engine results and your web page’s load time influences how easily users can find it on the web.
2. Conversion
The faster your page loads, the more commitment you will have from the user and slow sites, kill conversion. Users will be costive to use your site and perform Call-To-Actions (CTAs) if your web page so much time to load. It leads to user irritation and as a result, they will leave your site without buying your product or consuming your services.
3. Usability
The better your website load time is the well pleased the user will be and as a result, customer retention would be higher.
Read It: How to Rank on Google Page #1 Fast (in-depth Case Study)
The factor that affects page load time or tips and tricks to optimize
Many factors affect the page load time, out of those I have listed the top five mistakes that affect the load time in your website and I have come across them while building websites.
1. A large number of HTTP requests
An HTTP request is a message sent from a client to a server seeking information using the hypertext text transfer protocol (HTTP) and it is the method by which a web browser (client) receives the files needed to display a web page. Whenever the browsers need to get a file, page, or image from a web server. You can observe that how your applications make many network requests through the Network tab in Developer Tools. The browser usually limits the number of simultaneous requisitions between 4-8 and you cannot make a large number of requests in parallel either.
Why is reducing HTTP Requests important?
HTTP requests are a component to displaying your site, but all that talking back and forward takes time. In fact, Yahoo has pretended that 82% of a website page load time is spent downloading HTTP requests.
A web page needs to download information like stylesheets, images, and scripts in order to display properly and this information is recovered via an HTTP request sent by a browser to your site’s servers. The longer a page takes to load, the greater the possibility of users leaving your site, and the less likely the page will appear high in SERPs.
2. Absence of CDN
If there is no CDN for your website, load time increases when the user’s physical location is far from the server and these latencies get visible since it affects all the HTTP requests to the server. Using a CDN will improve page load time and will enable users to fetch the resources required for the webpage from a server nearest to their location or servers in a CDN are distributed across various geographical locations. This method may be high-priced, but it is an effective way to improve your application load time.
It is also most important to properly configure CDN to cache content with the right Time To Live (TTL) values for efficient usage.
But what happens for the very first request or the CDN cache gets expired, since it might travel to the origin to collect the data?
Read It: Top SEO Trends to Rank Your Website in 2021
This is the first thing to get interesting and if you are operating on a scale where the impact of loading data from the origin is high, you could evaluate warming up your CDN and most of the CDN service owns their network backbone. They can provide a higher quality of service compared to the internet and this will reduced packet loss resulting in faster loading times.
3. Large file size and medium image size
Recovering a large file or a page from the web server will devour a lot of time and fetching a few such large files makes the image size medium or makes the more page load time.
File size for the images and photos is a very smooth way to determine the quality of an image and in the above images, you can see the HB50 cupcakes images is a .jpg file and 2 Mb in size. The 50HB Jukebox is also a .jpg file and 720kb in size. A kilobyte or KB is smaller, much smaller than a Megabyte or MB. So the 50HB Jukebox is smaller than the HB50 cupcakes one.
How to re-size your images for your websites?
As a website owner or editor you are going to make and use a lot of photos and images and the better quality the images are, the better your site will look. If your site will slow down if the files are too big or recommended to size your photos to the dimensions recommended by your site and to keep file size to under 100 KB. You can allow the email software and websites to compress and re-size the images for you but if you do this you have less control over how they look.
4. Loading all resources at the same time
Loading all your resources HTML, CSS, and JS files at the same time will increase page load time as rendering will get blocked until all these resources are loaded in the pages.
5. A large number of redirects
We have to use redirects to handle moved or deleted pages to avoid broken links and more redirects mean more HTTP requests. The time page load time is extremely and Google instructs site owners to eliminate redirects to improve load time especially on mobile-first sites.
301 redirects are very pretty simple and they can use to redirect one webpage to another but understanding how they relate to SEO is more complicated.
What is a 301 redirect?
It indicates that the constant moving of a web page from one location to another. The 301 redirects refer to the HTTP status code of the redirected page.
How to do a 301 redirect?
There are many ways to do 301 redirects, but the most common method is to edit your sites .htaccess file and you will find this in your site’s root folder:
Don’t see the file? That means one of two things:
- You don’t have a .htaccess file. Create one using Notepad (Windows) or Text Edit (Mac), just create a new document and save it as .htaccess and make sure to remove the standard .txt file extension.
- Your site isn’t running on an Apache webserver. There are different types of webserver i.e. Apache, Windows/IIS, and Nginx is the most similar, and only Apache server use .htaccess to check that your website runs on Apache ask your web host.
CONCLUSION
Who doesn’t love your website that loads faster? I hope the article persuades you enough regarding the importance of page time load. If you are thinking of assessing your website performance, there are many tools that you can use such as YSlow, Pingdom, and Google Pagespeed Insights, etc. The most important point here is to address the top concerns instead of looking to fix all the issues that are proposed by the evaluation tools.
