Did you know…?
53% of visits are likely to be abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
Google
How fast your site loads strongly influences whether your visitors stay or go. Website speed affects users’ behavior in many ways. Slow sites cause site abandonment, shorter visits, fewer recommendations of your website, and fewer purchases. This is why site performance is a factor in how your websites is ranked in search engine results pages.
There are many ways to speed up a website. Knowing what the issues are is the first step to fixing them. Here are a few factors that impact web performance.
Factors in slowing down websites
Web host performance
Not all web hosting companies are created equal. Some will serve your website quickly while others do not. Choosing the right host can improve your website’s performance.
Page size
Loading a larger page takes longer. One content type that can contribute a lot to page size is images. Optimizing images can make your website load faster.
Dynamic web pages
On their own, With CMS pages like those in WordPress are loaded from the database every time they are accessed. Caching your website eliminates the need to recreate you pages every time your website is accessed.
Loading all images
Loading all images at once slows down page speed by preventing the page from displaying before all images are loaded. “Lazy loading” loads only the images in the visible part of the page to improve page speed.
Unused code
Code that is not used in a website still loads with your website and slows your pages down. Removing unused code makes your site more efficient.
Separate code files
Websites can be developed with many code files. Combining and “minifying” (removing extra spaces) them makes your pages load faster.
Fast performance built in
We understand how important fast loading sites are to user experience and SEO. We develop all of our websites for fast loading from the start. We also improve performance for existing websites.
Case study
S. Mayer Law is a Houston, Texas, based firm specializing in mediation and arbitration. Their website loaded extremely slowly when we began a design refresh of the website. So, we improved performance in addition to our design and development work.
The problem
When we started working with S. Mayer Law, their website loading in an painfully slow 17.2 seconds. There were a number of factors contributing to slow loading speed including slow initial server response time and large amounts of content being served.
The solution
Working with the web hosting company and our own tried-and-true methods, we improved page speed from 17.2 seconds to 1.5 seconds.