Every business owner wants content to get conversions, traffic, coverage, recognition in search engines and other related business parameters—ROI, LTV—and sales. It would be best to take care of your site’s performance; page speed is critical to accomplish this.
It depends on how well the page loading speed is configured and whether the user will like to interact with the site. Online stores with low performance and slow pages will get low conversion rates in SERPs. As a result, the business will overtake competitors.
Your potential buyers are waiting for an instant page load! That is why we decided to discuss this topic.
What Is Page Speed?
Website loading speed is the time that passes from the moment a user clicks on a link to the moment when he sees a fully loaded page.
Many often forget about page loading speed to make the site more beautiful for users, add creative design, and develop unique content with lots of graphics and videos. At the same time, this factor plays a decisive role for users.
Page Loading Process
Site loading speed is divided into two types: client loading and server loading. They are equally crucial for page loading speed, but each has its characteristics. Server loading responds to all requests and stages related to the server’s speed (DNS request, establishing a secure connection, HTML page request and waiting, and the like). Client loading is responsible for all stages of page loading, depending on the site and its initial content.
Let’s break down the page load cycle:
- Immediately after the search query, the client follows the hyperlink to the site
- The browser sends a request to the web server
- The web server processes the request.
- The web server sends a response to the browser.
- The browser receives the information.
- The browser parses, loads, and displays the page’s content.
- The page becomes fully accessible in the browser.
Considering the page load cycle, it is already becoming clear that placing content close to your audience is the main thing.
What is happening on the server at this moment?
On the server, the process of searching for the necessary information is as follows:
- The server receives a request from the browser. Special software deals with the processing and analysis of the request, which interacts with handler programs, such as PHP.
- The generated response is forwarded to the browser. The answer consists of encoded information about how the web page should appear.
What Happens on the Browser Side?
The browser can also help your site display faster. Now it’s time to discuss what the browser does:
- Authentication of the site’s IP address happens in the following sequence: the browser accesses the browsing history — cached data — or uses the DNS server. Not finding the necessary information will redirect the request to servers of a different rank.
- Create an HTTP request to get the desired content.
- Receiving a response from the server and sequentially displaying data — basic HTML code, additional elements such as videos or pictures.
The optimal loading time is 2–3 seconds, and the ideal user reaction time is 0.5 seconds. However, for highly loaded web applications, the optimal speed may differ.
Let’s start by discussing download speed issues.
- Loading speed ultimately affects the conversion: sales and earnings of the store — more orders, more receipts.
- It also affects the user experience, emotional impression and return of customers to this site — customer base size, and brand loyalty, recommendations to acquaintances.
- The higher the download speed on mobile, the higher it is rated by search engines and higher in the search results. The more chances to get more visitors and, as a result, orders.
- If the site takes a long time to load — more than 3 – 4 seconds, and sometimes two seconds — patient buyers get annoyed and leave the site for the competitor’s site. We are already used to it, and it annoys us when the store does not load on a smartphone.
- If the page takes a long time to load, it can also spoil the impression of the appearance and operation of the site as some of the essential design resources do not load on time.
- It is essential to optimize sites, namely Core Web Vitals, which are critical indicators in the Google test) — they rank sites.
- The most important thing is that the product, category and checkout pages load quickly. The first two types account for 72% of site views, checkout being the most important final step.
- After fout seconds, the “conversion zone” closes and buyers leave.
- Loading speed on mobile is even more important than on desktop.
- If a brand invests in advertising, download speed will be affected.
What Factors Affect Website Loading Time?
Some factors that affect boot time cannot be changed, but you can eliminate some.
Web Hosting
You can choose between different types of servers provided by hosting companies. However, the main thing is to choose the right web host. After all, if your hosting does not have enough server resources, you will face the problem of slow loading.
Images, Videos and Files
A large number of files and large file sizes on a page will take longer to load, which means you need to optimize all of your images.
Plugins
To extend the functionality of a website, WordPress website owners often add plugins. However, you should carefully choose the number of plugins.
Browsers
The browser also affects the page load time, and older versions of the browser may not be compatible with the code and new resources on the pages.
Clearing the cache
When you visit a website, cache information is stored on your computer, and this helps you access them faster. However, when clearing the cache, the download speed will be slower.
How to Increase Website Loading Speed?
Working on increasing the speed of loading the site is the task of programmers. And here’s what they can do:
– Image Optimization
Images greatly affect page speed, and large images can significantly slow down a page and take up a lot of screen space resulting in poor page performance.
To achieve this goal, you will be able to:
- Set image parameters by width, height, and weight
- Compress large images
- Add previews to large images so they load faster
– Remove Unnecessary Plugins, Counters, and Modules: Always keep up-to-date installed plugins, modules, and codes; this will speed up the site. We advise you to pay attention becaue problematic plugins can slow down your website and expose it to certain security risks, including hackers and attacks. Also, make sure that your website code is well-optimized.
– Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN): Enabling a reliable CDN can further increase your site’s page speed,because when users are browsing the Internet, the physical location of your servers can affect page loading times. Unlike conventional networks, a CDN hosts your website in the cloud, delivering content to servers as close as possible to your customers. In addition, CDNs help reduce hosting bandwidth through caching, ensuringmore efficient delivery and rendering of the content of your web pages. A CDN can handle different types of content, including HTML pages, JavaScript files, server-side videos and images, and style sheets. CDNs offer several other benefits that go beyond reducing load times. In addition, these networks can protect your website from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which hackers often launch to overwhelm a website and cause it to crash. CDNs also protect against other types of attacks and hackers and can ensure that content is always available in the event of traffic spikes or malware intrusion.
– Choose 1-2 Fonts: For a more correct and faster loading, it is better to use a small number of fonts;this will look more aesthetically pleasing and help reduce page loading speed
– Enable Caching: Allowing browsers to cache and save site information will make reloading the site much faster.
– Enable “Lazy Loading” of Images: LazyLoad, or “lazy loading”, is an option in which images are not loaded immediately and not automatically, but only if the user needs them.