Decrease Website Load Time

How long does your site take to load? 2 seconds? 5 seconds? Longer?

According to Kissmetrics, 47 percent of visitors expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40 percent of visitors will leave the website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds.

Let’s imagine it’s Spring in Lancaster, PA and your 3 kids are itching to get outside. This year you received a raise at work and want to splurge on a nice play set. You do a search for “swing set lancaster pa” and get several results. You click on the first link that jumps out at you and you wait…and wait…and wait some more. At this point you’re thinking to yourself, “This website isn’t going to load; I’m out of here.” You proceed to click the back button and leave the first website you found and then you continue searching for another swing set dealer.

Now imagine if you were the swing set dealer that the potential customer found first. You just lost a sale because your website took too long to load.

Is your website too slow?

Let’s take a look at your own website. What is the goal of your site? Maybe you are you looking to sell products or discuss the types of services you offer. Whatever it may be, you want website visitors to access your information quickly. If your site has a long load time, you take the risk that those visitors will click away before even getting to your content.

You might be wondering, ‘How do I make sure my website loads fast enough?’. Well, most of it depends on your website developer. There are a few things we do such as combining scripts and style sheets, caching data and images, and limiting the number of calls to the server. But, you can play a part in decreasing load time as well. When working with a website developer to create each page on your website or when modifying each page on your own, keep in mind what the goal of the page is. Cluttering up your site with large images, social media feeds, iframes of other sites, or fancy scripts that add animation to the page will increase load time.

5 Tips to Decrease Page Load Time

1. Reduce Image File Size

You may use online resources such as Image Optimizer to compress your images before uploading them to your website. The lower the file size, the better load time will be.

2. Limit Pulling Content from Other Websites

Social Media feeds can pull content from your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or other social media accounts on to your website. If you use one of these feeds, take a look at your site and make sure there is a benefit to having it. These feeds increase load time because they have to search for another website and find the appropriate content to display.

Iframes also increase load time. An iframe is like putting another website on top of yours. For instance, on the Find Us page of our website, we use an iframe to display a map from Google Maps that shows our location in Ephrata, PA. Same as social media feeds, iframes increase load time because they are pulling content from another website.

3. Reduce Number of Scripts

Jquery scripts can add animation and functionality to your website. For instance take a look at this gallery: Image Show. This gallery uses jquery to animate each of the images, which looks really cool, but it takes 7.09 seconds to load. If you were to add this gallery to a page on your website along with your existing content, how much longer would it take for the page to load? Always keep load time in mind when you’re thinking of adding animation to your own site.

4. Choose the Right Web Host

Your web host is the company that provides you the server where the files that make up your website sit. There are things that can be done on each server that help to decrease page load time. The faster your server is, the faster your website will be. WebTek offers a great hosting plan that you are sure to be happy with.

5. Make Use of Google Webmaster Tools

PageSpeed Insights is a tool that analyzes page load speed, and gives you tips on how to make improvements.

Once again, most visitors aren’t going to wait around for your site to load. Help improve your visitors experience by decreasing load time. Anyone here at WebTek would be happy to take a look at your website’s load time and come up with solutions on how to improve it. Give us a call anytime!