What is page speed and why is it important?
What started as simply another metric you could track on your website, now marks the difference between users staying on your site and taking their business elsewhere.
Page speed is defined as the length of time it takes to load all the content on a page. And, with a recent study reporting 1 in 4 visitors will abandon a website if it takes more than four seconds to load, it’s vital you monitor your website’s page speed if you want to avoid an increase in bounce rates and a decrease in conversions. After all, the faster the pages load on your website, the better overall user experience you will provide, and the more likely users will be to stay on your website.
How to check the page speed of a website
So, with that in mind, you’re probably wondering how you can find out the Page Speed of your website, to ensure it’s not impacting the user experience.
Page Speed Insights is a free online tool which can provide insight into the overall quality of your website’s page speed. Once you input your website’s URL, you’ll receive an overall score between 0 and 100. This score is a good indicator to how your pages are performing. However, if your score is lower than you’d like, you can scroll down to view specific problem areas which are contributing to your score.
When using Page Speed Insights, it’s important you view the page speed score for both mobile and desktop versions of your website. As mobile internet traffic now makes up more than 50% of total online traffic, the page speed of your site on mobile devices could be having a huge impact on the overall performance of your business.
How to improve page load speed
One of the most common contributing factors to a low page speed score is imagery. Whilst you want your website to look visually appealing to users, it’s important your images are appropriately sized. For example, if you have an image that’s overly large, we’d recommend resizing the image before uploading it to the CMS. This is particularly important for mobile sites, which require much smaller images than desktop sites.
Once you have resized your images, we’d also recommend reviewing the file types. If you’re currently relying on JPEG and PNG images for your website, you may want to consider converting your images to a WebP file. WebP images use a more optimised compression algorithm, which in turn, means faster downloads and less data consumption, resulting in an overall faster page speed.
Need help optimising your website’s page speed?
At Spindogs, our Web Development team are on hand to provide more information on improving the page speed of your website. So, if you’ve had a look at your page speed score and would like expert advice on optimising your mobile and desktop websites, feel free to get in touch.