WEBSITE’S SPEED MATTERS & Image


Pingdom.



The speed of your website matters for two reasons:
  1. Your user’s experience
  2. SEO
Your site’s speed matters for 2 reasons: your user’s experience and SEO.
When it comes to user experience, Google’s research experiments show that faster site speed leads to happier users, increased productivity, and more time users spend browsing.
Moreover, research by Kissmetrics showed that 40% of people will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. 47% of users expect a page to load in two seconds or less.
Overall, the speed of your site has a greater impact on user satisfaction than extra “bells and whistles”. It doesn’t matter how great a site looks: if it loads too slowly, users will click away.
Regarding SEO, Google uses site speed as one of the many factors that determines rank (how high your page appears in search results).
To determine rankings, Google factors pagespeed on both desktop and mobile platforms. If your site’s speed isn’t up to par, you can suffer ranking penalties.
Bing also uses pagespeed as a factor.
The reason why site speed matters is that search engines want to point users to sites with the best overall experience and information. Users can’t access all the great info you have if your site is unbearably slow.

HOW TO CHECK YOUR WEBSITE’S SPEED

To tell whether your website is slow or not, use one of the many free tools out there designed to report just that. Here are several:
  1. Google’s PageSpeed Insights: Google’s very own tool. Gives mobile and desktop recommendations.
  2. Pingdom: Useful for all skill levels. Reviews site performance, grades it, and tracks performance history so you can see how your site speed has changed.
  3. GTmetrix: One of the most popular tools out there. GTmetrix analyzes how well your site loads, checking both PageSpeed and YSlow scores. It also gives suggestions on how to improve the load time.
  4. YSlow: Grades webpages on how they meet established high-performance guidelines. Also summarizes the different components of the website and allows you to view the analysis, offers advice on how to improve your site. YSlow offers a Chrome extension to test the speed of websites.
My personal favorite is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It’s easy to use and the results are presented clearly. It also organizes suggestions by “should fix”, “consider fixing”, and “passed rules”.
google-site-speed-test
I also like Pingdom, and will refer to it more later in the article.
Understand that results can vary from tool to tool. This is completely normal since they have differing metrics and are using different places in the world to test the site.
Now, let’s get on to some ways you can speed up your site and increase your website’s customer appeal.

9 WAYS TO MAKE YOUR WEBSITE LOAD FASTER

1. IMPROVE YOUR HOSTING PLAN

This is one of the simplest ways you can speed up your website: looking at your server.
Often when we first start out, we go the cheap way and sign up for shared hosting. However, as sites grow in usage and content, they get slower. You can battle this by upgrading your hosting plan (moving to a VPS or dedicated option).
Slow site? Consider upgrading your hosting plan from shared to VPS.
To illustrate, I used to be on Bluehost’s basic shared plan. A few months ago, I noticed my site was slowing down. I tried everything possible to make it faster, but nothing seemed to work. So, I decided to switch to Bluehost’s managed WordPress hosting plan.
After I upgraded from my basic shared plan, I noticed differences right away.
The reason it is so much faster is simple: you get dedicated resources. This means you don't have to share bandwidth, RAM, CPU, etc. with anyone else. Also, the bandwidth limits are also much higher. Moreover, Bluehost has Varnish — which is an extremely optimized caching option that allows a larger number of visitors than shared hosting.
A quick note about VPS vs. dedicated hosting:
VPS hosting is probably the option you want to go with. It’s “in the cloud,” meaning it is distributed over multiple computers, sometimes even hundreds. It’s a scalable solution, and it’s a more affordable solution than dedicated hosting. Bloggers and medium/small businesses will find this option most appealing.
Dedicated servers are like you are renting out a big box. It’s essentially like owning own computer. The biggest upside to dedicated over VPS is that you have full control, because you have all the resources to yourself. However – it is usually much more expensive. And unlike a VPS, it’s less flexible, since you don’t have numerous computers.
For more info on the difference between VPS and dedicated options, check out this article. And for more on the best WordPress hosting options, continue here.

2. UNDERSTAND HTTP REQUESTS

Sites are mainly slow because of too many (or too large) HTTP requests. When you understand HTTP requests, you can better eliminate them.
Tip: too many HTTP requests often results in a slow website.
According to rve.org.uk,
“Whenever your web browser fetches a file (a page, a picture, etc) from a web server, it does so using HTTP – that's “Hypertext Transfer Protocol”. HTTP is a request/response protocol, which means your computer sends a request for some file (e.g. “Get me the file ‘home.html'”), and the web server sends back a response (“Here's the file”, followed by the file itself).”
There are many ways you can reduce or eliminate HTTP requests, which this article covers later.

However, to see how many HTTP requests a page on your site makes, you can run a speed test on Pingdom.

requests-ltcwm-blog
You can see that the learntocodewith.me/blog make 23 requests.
With Pingdom, you can sort the requests by file size and load time. This allows you to see the biggest culprits. The image below was taken on my learntocodewith.me homepage:
http-requests-by-load-time
As you can see, the large image of me takes the longest to load.

3. MAKE IMAGES INTERNET-FRIENDLY

Site size generally, and image sizes specifically, make a huge difference to your site speed. The larger your content/images, the slower the site.
Some basic ways to counteract this is by shrinking the file sizes of images on your site, reducing the number of images you use, or eliminating them altogether. (This is why I removed featured images on my blog reel last year when I redid the site.)
But having no images on your site is boring! Rather than removing them, optimize images before uploading them to your site by:
  1. Changing the resolution: reducing the “quality” of the image (and thereby the file size)
  2. Compressing the picture: increasing the efficiency of image data storage
  3. Cropping the picture: when cropping, you are cutting out unneeded areas and thus making the image smaller in size
Website speed tip: unoptimized images can slow your website down dramatically.
You can make these kinds of changes in a premium tool like Photoshop, or a free program like Gimp. There are even in-browser tools like picresize.com.
For Mac users, there is a free program called ImageOptim, which “optimizes compression parameters, removes junk metadata and unnecessary color profiles.”
On WordPress, there is a free plugin called WP-Smushit, which removes hidden information present in images. WP-Smushit scans images as you upload them to WordPress, and prevents unnecessary data from hanging on. It decreases the file size while maintaining the quality of the image.
wp-smush-plugin

4. USE PLUGINS SPARINGLY (WP SITES ONLY)

Plugin bloat can significantly slow your site performance by creating too many extra files, thus increasing load time.
Try to avoid the use of plugins whenever possible. In my opinion, it’s not possible to avoid plugins entirely. But there are ways you can reduce the overall count.
For starters, if there is an easy way to get around using a plugin – do it. (Example: the Google Analytics plugin. Instead, just add the tracking code to your website footer manually.)
Also, every 4-6 months, set aside time to review your plugins. Evaluate each one and delete it if:
  1. You don’t use it anymore.
  2. It’s not doing what it’s supposed to be doing.
  3. It is “calling deprecated functions”
  4. There are new and improved plugins that will work better
Aside from taking up space, outdated WordPress plugins are often responsible for security vulnerabilities. (Think about it: it’s a third-party package of code on your site.) Just another reason to keep plugin count low.

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