Let’s suppose you have just built a new website for your company.
You have spent days working closely with the designers to make sure everything looks as expected. Many edits and changes have been made along the way, but you have finally managed to launch it!
After all the effort that went into this project, you notice a ‘minor’ issue: your fabulous brand-new website isn’t as fast as you need it to be. The bad news is that this issue is actually critical, and you should be focussing on solving it as soon as possible.
Speed is Vital
If you don’t have a fast website, people will leave the page without even thinking. Ask yourself this: would you, as a user, spend several seconds waiting for a website to load? Surely not! When it comes to building a conversion rate and search engine optimised website, speed is vital.
The BBC studied the impact of website speed and concluded that its site loses a 10% of users for every additional second it takes to load. So, it is clear that page speed is quite an important area to invest time to get right.
If taking so much time to load your page is making you lose potential customers, imagine the impact that this ‘minor issue’ will have in your revenue. Zalando is a good example. The company saw a 0.7% increase in revenue when they shaved 100ms off their load time. If they did it, you can too!
Identifying the issue
Whether you have just launched your new website, are in the middle of doing so or are planning to improve the performance and conversion rate of your site, you should be regularly checking page speed.
Using tools to check that your website is up-to-speed (literally), is the first thing to do. Your problem could be anything from code that’s written poorly, to images or large page elements, so knowing where to focus is essential. There are very useful tools that can help you diagnose the specific problems on your website and give you recommendations on how to solve them. Ideally, you should be building for speed before you even start coding so that it is integral to the process.
Page Speed tools
This website identifies any performance issues and bottlenecks. You can run a website speed test for free using real browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE) and real devices (although these are physically located in Dulles, VA), at real consumer connection speeds. Some of the tested areas include multi-step transactions, video capture or content blocking. The report provided by this page will give you some key suggestions for improvement.
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/
Lighthouse is another tool that can help you improve the quality of your web page. You can run it against any web page. The site will provide you with a diagnosis report on performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and more, and is the technology used in Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool ( https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ ).
Getting help
If the results that you get from these tools are not making any sense and you need help figuring them out and how to speed things up, contact us now. At ExtraDigital we have been creating successful websites for more than 20 years and are always up to date with the latest trends. Talk to us if you are unsure of how well or bad your website performs when it comes to speed and we’ll help you get it right.
Source: https://wpostats.com/
