A Faster Web Page is Better!
This is hardly a question I need to answer – let’s face it you’re an internet user and I’m guessing like me you don’t like waiting for a page to load – so that in itself should be enough to convince you.
Of course it isn’t very scientific to say “web pages should load fast because I don’t like waiting”. But this premise is supported by numerous facts echoing this very statement.
Kissmetrics.com have compiled data from both Gomez and Akamai depicting the correlating increase in abandonment rate as webpage load times increase.
Another infographic, this one from Webby Monks shows how a mere 1 second increase in page load time negatively affects your website.
These show that users simply aren’t tolerant to delay and will leave your website, the longer they have to wait. In fact more than 83% of people expect a web page to load in 3 seconds or less which is echoed by a 40% abandonment if it takes longer than this.
So we can see the importance of having a fast website and the positive impacts this has on users, web performance and conversion, but that’s not all, another critical reason is that site speed (and as a result page speed) is a contributing factor in Google’s algorithm to rank pages.
“A faster page speed is better.”
While the loading speed of your website is a simple concept to grasp the reality is that this encompasses an array of contributing page speed factors which can be broken into 2 groups:
- Those factors that relate to network and resource download, and;
- Those factors that relate to the rendering or drawing of the web page in your browser.
The “network” group of factors I’m sure will seem fairly obvious as logic would dictate having less to download means your browser will get the content quicker, therefore can render this content faster and this is what compressing images, minifying resources, enable browser caching, removing and combining files and using gzip compression is all about.
The second group of factors however may not be quite as obvious as they relate to how quickly the page is rendered within the browser. For instance does the page display even if it still downloading resource or files behind the scene. If the browser has to wait for the resource to download before continuing to draw the webpage then this is referred to as “render blocking”.
Thus improving web page page speed is about reducing how long it takes before you as a user can effectively see, read, use and engage with the web page once you’ve navigated to it in your browser.
If you want to get into the nitty gritty of what you can do to improve it then check out – Web Page Speed – Let’s Improve It – or give us a call.
Andy Brown
www.strategus.co.nz
