You don’t have to be a genius to determine that your website loads slowly. Logically, if you see that the website is not loading within more than 3 seconds, well, it’s time to make some changes.
When a customer enters a website, the first element they notice is the page speed, and it usually impacts how they invest their time in your website. Site speed is also an important factor that determines the user experience of a customer journey and the SEO effort you give your site for visibility. It is like an invisible connection that is indirectly connected that would thrive your site.
Do you know that Google has their own system when it comes to determining a website’s loading speed?
Now, around June 2021, Google was renewing the algorithms related to SEO page experiences that are integrated with Core Web Vitals. The important factor of Core Web Vitals is page speed.
The Largest Contentful Paint or LCP and First Input Delay/Interactivity or FID are two signals within the Core Web Vitals that are used to determine anything and everything related to site speed.
So, LCP and FID work, as the LCP signals would track down the estimated amount of time it takes to load a website. However, Google determines the time by measuring the First Contentful Paint and the LCP, so if the number is above 2,5 seconds to load a website, then it has a slow loading time.
When it comes to FID, it mainly looks out for factors like how long it takes for a page to be interactive once it loads. The measuring begins at the time when a user clicks a button, and the link opens for the user.
It is important to understand the scope of the problem before running to fix it. So site speed is a problem that is invisibly scattered around the website. We are speaking about the large volume of pages. The focus is to figure out if it's the site speed or the page speed. This is quite useful when you audit and analyse the pages by factors like the slowest load time, the highest monthly service volume, the traffic volume or which page on your site gives the broadest business impact.
Having a lot of information on a page can be quite heavy on the site, like rich media, an extensive comment section, maybe some white spaces, empty new lines, or inline styling. This could drag down your site with files that are uncompressed and codes which are not properly optimised. So it is important to reduce the load on your website for better use.
Best way to have a site load quickly is to comprise and present the information on your website page in a minimal layout. From the beginning point to the fully loaded page, it should be just 3 seconds, so to do that, adding minimal information is vital. Make sure not to add too many stylesheets, rich images, videos,or scripts. Remove anything excess if it doesn’t have any purpose on your website, as this is going to cost your site speed.
Another way to increase the speed of a website can be done from the user's side. Give suggestions to users to enable browser caching, as this takes care of half of the work if they are regular visitors to your site. It works by caching large or significant data from the site while they visit the site. The next time they visit, it automatically retrieves the data on future requests, and the user can access it in a nick of time. By this, you cache elements like images, HTTP, etc
Websites nowadays vary from niche to niche, you can find at least ten eCommerce stores popping up one after another on average, or the next-door yoga, gym instructor or dance studio comes rolling with a new business website every now and then. However, do you know what they all have in common, A heavily visual-centric website. Well, that has become a critical point if you need a thriving business. But this can also increase the load time of your site. Yes, high resolution can be a blunder at times, as it heavily drains the bandwidth of your site. A suggestion to tackle this problem is that you should compress your images before you splurge it around the internet. The tagline is Compress to Optimise.
Technically, it is more important to understand what the problem is and why is it affecting your site as important as fixing it. Even though experts can find it out in one glance what the problem is and fix it, but there is another vigorous process we usually forget. It is to routinely check on it to maintain it. Simply put, do some high-maintenance checkups routinely to keep your site low-maintenance.
