When developing a website, the speed of sites is not always considered. Functionality and layout have a higher priority for most projects. Sites are also becoming more and more extensive: beautiful large images and videos as background, lots of information and functionalities such as links with social media and animations. This trend can be at the expense of speed, which can have significant consequences on your website’s visibility.
From the moment a website is requested via the address bar or clicked at Google, the server goes to work with a lightning-fast calculation to generate the page and send it to the user. During this time the user is waiting for the page, a crucial moment whose waiting time can vary greatly. The time between requesting and displaying a page is often between 1-2 seconds for well-optimized websites, while it may take 10 or more seconds for slow sites.
27% more conversion with a fast loading time!
An investigation by Soasta has shown that the conversion of websites up to 27% goes up when the loading time of a website is one second shorter. A Google test showed a 20% reduction in online traffic when loading the results took only half a second longer. Amazon concluded that every 0.1 second extra loading time resulted in 1% lower sales.
The general user experience of fast websites is better, and users stay longer on websites. Given that online users can move to competitors with unprecedented ease (because they are just a click away), the user experience and user retention are more important than ever. In addition to users’ experience, search engines also look at the loading times of websites as part of the algorithm that assesses websites. Google sent a message to website developers in 2010 with the encouragement to improve the speed of websites to be placed higher in the search results.
What needs to be adjusted?
Many different systems are hidden under the bonnet of a website. Among other things, generating pages, retrieving information from a database, loading images and displaying the page in a web browser. Besides, a lot of communication between web browsers and servers is required, in many cases, more than 100 messages between a browser and server are exchanged in the background before the page can be fully displayed. Every step in the process can be a weak link that can significantly affect the loading time of the website. Examples of solutions are optimizing the code, reducing images and applying to cache.
What do we do in the field of speed?
With a team of experts, we can investigate the weak links in the speed of websites and tackle the problems in a targeted manner. We provide all standard speed optimizations but also look further. Each website is unique and therefore requires a tailor-made solution. On to the best customer experience and online visibility!
New service from Google – Page Speed Tool
Since a few days, Google has launched the Page speed tool. The Page Speed tool, which for several months had been released a beta version of Google, is an online application that allows you to check your website on technical points that affect the speed of the site. This is in the area of on-page optimization interesting because a website that loads slower (than necessary) can be ranked lower. Besides, it is, of course, to a visitor a nice to have a website that loads fast. The one does not go without the other:). A chance to using this tool to see if you can make your site load faster.
How does the tool work?
Through various ways, you can perform this analysis. You can do this, for example, online or through a plugin in your Chrome or Firefox browser. When you run the analysis for the URL that you specified, then comes Google with a score for the website. A kind of optimization score for the speed aspect of your website. This score runs from 0 to 100. And which, of course, a perfect score is 100.
In addition to the score gives the result findings which are divided into the ratings high price, medium price, low price, experimental rules or conclusions that worth watching but that do not affect the rash, and already done or what We’ve already done to optimize your website in this area. We think it advisable to get started with at least the high and medium priority findings.