Is Page Load Speed Important?

April 7, 2015 By Ed Pudlo Leave a Comment

Want More People to View your Content? Improve your Page Load Speeds…

If one of your goals is to best optimize your site for search, then you should consider the importance placed on having your pages load quickly. There are a several great reasons why you’ll want to make sure this is so, among them:

• Google uses this as a ranking factor for your page.
• Humans now have an attention span of 8 seconds, one second less than a goldfish.
• The average retail web page can take more than 7 seconds to load. It’s been noted that a delay as small as one second can cost you a whopping 7% hit in your conversion rates.

Given these stark statistics, it’s high time we look into some ways we can improve our page load speeds.

5 Tips for reducing your page load time

Google PageSpeed Insights – A major ranking factor, the speed at which your pages load is actually super easy and free to check out. Google provides a free tool called PageSpeed Insights which grades your page and suggest fixes you can make to make things quicker, and it works on both desktop and mobile.

Limit redirects – Make sure you don’t have more redirects than you actually need, as these are prone to causing pages to load slower due to more http requests. You’ll require some for your responsive mobile version of your site, so don’t eliminate those!

Unplug some plugins – You might have far too many plugins, and some of them could be gumming up the works when it comes to having your pages load quickly. Eliminate any you aren’t using, and test the ones you are using  to determine if they are optimized well. (They are making your pages slow down and increasing your security vulnerability, so reduce!)

Be sure to optimize your images – Images can have a large effect on your page load speeds, and to make the best of this try not to have too many on a single page, use JPEGs whenever possible, and optimize them for the web.

Enable page compression – Enabling compression on your pages, thereby reducing their size and allowing them to be loaded far faster is a really good idea. This is best accomplished with a tool called Gzip, and can result in page loads 70% faster!

Thanks for reading about “Page Load Speed”

Let me know how this article was helpful or if you need more information about anything discussed here!