Speed kills!
Lack of speed when it comes to websites. No-one wants to hang around waiting for a slow website to load. It is incredibly frustrating and most people do not have the time or patience to wait. Research shows anything over 1 second load time will affect conversion rates of your website. In fact, every tenth of a second over a 2 second load time bleeds customers. Numbers vary depending on who you believe, but it is several percent of your website users for every tenth of a second.
Going faster
So we have a clear need-for-speed, but how can you achieve a faster website? There are dozens of little detailed improvements to make to fully optimise a site, but follow these three big ones and you’ll make huge progress.
- Good Hosting
- Optimise Images
- Turn on Caching
1. Good hosting
The crux of this is that website hosts are not made equal. A web host is, fundamentally, a computer connected to the internet. Web hosting computers have specialist software to do the job, but many of the things you might intuit about them as computers are true. Namely, these computers will perform better if:
- there’s better the hardware in the computer
- it has less simultaneous tasks to do
- and it has an amazing internet connection
Web hosting companies will often promise you lots of storage, email, and other bells and whistles, such as unmetered bandwidth or several database installations. In fact it is likely these will be the features they tout most. However, none of these things affect your website performance. You probably don’t even need most of them. What matters is the expenditure the hosts expenditure on their hardware, and how many other clients are sharing that particular hardware with your website. Comparing this can be hard as many companies are cagey about it, rough rule of thumb though; the cheapest packages are nearly always terrible.
2. Image optimisation
Images are a super important part of your website presentation and message. They are also the bulk of the “data payload” on most websites. A customer using your website has to download all the images to their device. So how are your images “unoptimised”? The most common issues, images are…
- larger than they need to be
- the wrong format for the content
- not set to most relevant quality
How to fix these issues?
- Check the dimensions of your images.
Don’t make pictures larger in pixel width and height than they are going to be seen on the website. - Set the right formats.
Photos should be JPGs and graphics should generally be PNGs. There are new and exciting formats like WEBP, but these are a little harder for non-technical website administrators to use. - Set JPG qualities to around 50%.
It sounds harsh, but this is probably the best balance between performance and visual quality.
3. Turn on Caching
So most websites with content management or page builders are “dynamic”. Not dynamic in the marketing buzzword sense but rather the content the public sees is constructed on request. This is clever stuff, and allows for things like frequently updated blogs and whatnot without having to manually rebuild web pages constantly. However, if your website is building the page every time for every user, it can get a little redundant as it “dynamically” rebuilds the same page over and over. Most of us arent updating our websites that often, and instead we can get your web server to store the last dynamically constructed page for quick and easy display to the next visitor. That’s caching; storing a recent version of something for better performance.
The nuts and bolts of caching is complicated, so we suggest using an off the shelf piece of software like LiteSpeed to do all the settings for you.