Website Loading Times Are Vital - How to Improve Your Performance

When it comes to website loading times every second counts. A slow site will turn visitors away, rapidly decreasing your conversion rate.

It is important to note that website loading times have been proven to be a major factor in page abandonment. In fact, if your page takes just four seconds to load, you can expect a 25% abandonment rate. This underscores the urgency of optimising your site's performance.

Measuring Website Loading Times

Measuring your website's loading times is the first step towards optimization. Fortunately, there are various tools available, each offering unique advantages. By using these tools, you can gain valuable insights into your site's performance and identify areas for improvement. Here are a few of the best free methods for measuring site speed.

Using Chrome or Firefox Browsers

Both browsers offer comprehensive developer tools that feature a page-loading timeline so you can see the page speed and the elements that take up the most time.

External Websites

The default page for measuring site speed should be Google's own PageSpeed Insights

Google Analytics also contains a section measuring Site Speed with various platforms and browsers worldwide. This report can help determine if you need a Content Delivery Network (CDN), a distributed network of servers that delivers web content to users based on their geographic location, which can significantly improve website loading times.

Factors Affecting Website Loading Times

Many factors can harm a site's performance, but here are some of the most common.

Server and Server Configuration

Regardless of how optimised the content is, a slow, old, overloaded server will always hold your site back. Sometimes, this is a case of using the wrong hosting package, which refers to a set of services and resources provided by a hosting company for a website, for your requirements or using a bad hosting company. Some Web hosting companies are just plain rotten when it comes to performance. If you suspect your host is causing the problem, it may be time to change or at least upgrade to a better hosting package if your host provides one.

Bandwidth

Regarding the hosting company itself, how good is their internet connection? Suppose your server is only running on a domestic ADSL connection. That will hold back busy websites or websites with heavy content payloads (images, videos, etc.). Also, even smaller websites need larger bandwidth, which refers to the amount of data that can be transmitted over a network connection in a given amount of time, if they get sufficient numbers of visitors, and they will have to 'queue' to download files, resulting in poor performance.

Poor Coding

Poor coding is one of the prime areas for poor performance. It can lead to slow page load times, unresponsive pages, and even security vulnerabilities. However, it is also difficult for the average user to investigate and diagnose. Bloated HTML, CSS or javascript content can cause all sorts of performance and reliability problems with your website. With a proper developer, it is possible to diagnose and fix.

Poor Design

Every business wants a great-looking website, but going overboard on design themes and styles can lead to considerable performance drops. This is especially true if you use full-size, high-resolution images (see below) and automatically play videos and media.

Unoptimised Images

All on-site graphics should be properly compressed. Use thumbnails to represent larger, higher-quality images, which, when clicked on, open the original image. This will improve page load speed dramatically and reduce bandwidth usage.

How to Improve Website Loading Times

Having run one of the tools above and decided what is causing your site to run slow, it's time to address the issues.

If a lot of time is spent downloading images, try optimising images for the web. This will reduce image size, file size and bandwidth and result in significant speed gains.

If you use lots of images to represent icons, try switching to using SVG icons or font icons such as the excellent FontAwesome library.

If you are more technically minded or have a developer who is, try looking at optimising your PHP code. You can run performance benchmarks over code segments or pages to see where the bottlenecks are. Your application or database servers may need an upgrade.

If you're not already, try enabling compression on your site. Serving compressed pages reduces the amount of code sent to the browser, thus saving bandwidth and download times. This can lead to significant improvements in site speed. Enabling compression can be easy or difficult to set up depending on your server and software, but this guide on improving website speed by enabling compression should help.

Consider upgrading your hosting package, server, or hosting provider as a final resort. While this is the most costly option, it may be your only option if your server is holding you back.

Do you have any website optimisation tips to share? Have these tips helped your website loading times? Let us know in the comments below!