What Is Website Speed and Why is it Important?
Site speed is the time it takes for a web page to load and become usable by visitors. It’s hard to assign a specific number to page speed, as many metrics capture page load factors in different ways and for different purposes. However, a simple metric of page load is the number of seconds it takes until a page loads and is fully displayed in the user’s browser.
Another important metric in understanding website speed is the Time to First Byte (TTFB), which measures how quickly the server sends the first byte of the first file in response to a request. TTFB is crucial as it affects how users perceive the responsiveness of a webpage.
Over the past two decades, web performance has become a critical success factor for online properties. Many research studies showed that site speed has a major impact on website engagement, conversion, and revenues. The reality is that today’s web visitors are not prepared to wait, and will easily switch to a competing website if pages load slowly.
Site speed also has a significant impact on search engine optimization (SEO). Google, the world’s largest search engine and a major traffic source for most websites, uses mobile page speed as a ranking factor. Additionally, Google introduced Core Web Vitals (CWV), a set of metrics that measure how quickly users can interact with a web page. These factors play a key role in determining a website’s search engine ranking, further emphasizing the importance of fast load times for better SEO performance.
In this article:
Common Reasons for Slow Website
Server Delays
Server response time is a measure of how long it takes the browser to load HTML code when the page is first rendered on the server. Ideally, the server response time should be less than 200 ms.
Following are the most common reasons for slow server response time:
- Inefficient application logic — for example, non-optimized database queries and redundant control flow in the code can needlessly delay user requests.
- Insufficient hardware resources — the server’s central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), or storage may be insufficient to handle the current loads.
- Insufficient bandwidth — the server may not have sufficiently fast Internet connectivity.
- Server malfunction — problems with hardware or software deployed on the server may result in delays or downtime.
- High Traffic: A surge in the number of visitors can slow down a website, especially if the hosting infrastructure isn’t equipped to handle the increased load.
- Inefficient Database Design: A poorly designed database can lead to slow query responses and increased load times. It’s essential to ensure that the database is optimized for efficient data retrieval.
Unnecessary Redirects
If one page redirects users to another, site visitors must wait longer for the request and response cycle to complete. Redirects are useful when content has moved to a new location, or in cases where entire websites are migrated to a different server or domain. However, when redirects are not essential to maintaining the user experience, they should be avoided due to their negative impact on performance. Reducing unnecessary redirects can help improve site speed and overall user experience.
Code Density
One of the most effective strategies to enhance website page speed is optimizing your codebase. By refining your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can eliminate unnecessary characters, spaces, and comments that bloat the code and slow down page loading times. Minification plays a key role in this process, which involves compressing your code to reduce its size without changing its functionality. Tools like UglifyJS for JavaScript, CSSNano for CSS, and HTMLMinifier for HTML can help automate this process, making your code more efficient and quicker for browsers to parse.
Additionally, optimizing your codebase involves removing redundant or unused code. This practice not only reduces the load on the server but also shortens the time it takes for the browser to render the page. Efficient coding techniques, such as consolidating multiple CSS files into one or using asynchronous loading for JavaScript, help prioritize critical resources, which leads to faster load times.
Heavy Images
Image file size affects loading speed and quality. Content can be downloaded and rendered faster if a page is delivered with fewer bytes. This is especially important for mobile users who typically have more limited bandwidth. Modern websites make extensive use of rich media such as images and videos.
This makes it essential to optimize images. Instead of using high-resolution images that slow down loading times, consider using compressed or resized images that maintain visual quality while improving performance. Another effective strategy for boosting website speed is delivering rich media through a content distribution network (CDN), which caches content at locations closer to the end-user, reducing latency and speeding up load times.
Related content: Read our blog about CDN for images
Pro Tip!Improve Core Web Vitals with Cloudinary
To improve your Core Web Vitals metrics and make your website faster, it’s crucial to deliver responsive images. Cloudinary enables you to dynamically resize images on the fly, optimizing them for different screen sizes and resolutions. Additionally, Cloudinary offers features like size optimization and format conversion, ensuring your images load quickly while maintaining quality across devices.
Web Hosting Service
Poor web hosting can significantly affect your page loading speed. Many websites rely on inexpensive shared hosting plans, which, while cost-effective, often offer low and sometimes unpredictable performance. This can lead to slow load times, especially during periods of high traffic. Upgrading to a more reliable hosting solution, like dedicated hosting or cloud hosting, can ensure more consistent and faster performance for your website.
For smaller websites or personal projects, shared hosting packages may suffice. However, for commercial websites, especially those that generate revenue, it’s crucial to opt for high-end hosting services that offer guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure uptime and performance reliability. For larger-scale operations, website owners should consider dedicated servers or cloud hosting solutions that provide greater control, scalability, and consistent performance to support higher traffic demands.
If your website is on a shared hosting plan, it might be sharing server resources with other websites. This can lead to slower performance, especially if one of the websites on the server experiences a surge in traffic or has resource-intensive operations.
HTTP Requests
Modern web pages often consist of hundreds of resources, such as scripts, images, and CSS style sheets. Each of these resources requires an HTTP request from the web browser to the server, which can slow down overall page load times. To improve performance, developers should focus on minimizing the number of resources required to load a page and reducing the number of HTTP requests. By using tools like speed tests, you can identify which requests are taking the longest and optimize them for faster loading.
How to Test Website Speed?
There are various tools available for testing website speed and other performance indicators. Some tools focus on simply analyzing web pages and providing test results, while others go a step further by generating recommendations to help improve performance. These tools can offer valuable insights, helping developers identify bottlenecks and optimize the site for better speed and user experience.
Popular website speed testing tools include PageSpeed Insights by Google, GTMetrix, and Pingdom. Additional tools like DebugBear and Dotcom Tools offer comprehensive insights and can perform tests from multiple global locations, which is crucial for understanding geographical variations in website performance. These free tools offer insights into website performance and programmatically generate scores and suggestions.
Here are key features website speed tools offer:
Performance bottlenecks monitoring
Website speed tools use multiple browsers to load websites and replicate the user experience across different geographic locations. These tools monitor performance bottlenecks across various web page elements, such as load time, file size, response time, and requests related to website components like JavaScript, HTML, CSS files, and images. By providing a comprehensive analysis of how a website performs, they help developers pinpoint specific areas that can be optimized to improve overall site speed and user experience.
Performance scores
Website speed tools generate performance scores based on standards that measure web page performance and user priorities. It involves checking resource caching, data download and upload size, client-server round-trip times, and various rules that impact website speed.
Optimization suggestions
Website speed tools generate suggestions to improve page speed, indicating specific performance optimization actions, for example, compressing a large image file currently served uncompressed.
Website Speed Optimization: How to Improve Site Speed
Optimizing for fast page speeds is not just about improving user experience—it also plays a significant role in SEO. Websites that load quickly typically receive more traffic and have better conversion rates. This is especially true for mobile browsing, where a faster website can lead to higher rankings in Google’s search results, directly impacting visibility and organic traffic. As search engines like Google increasingly prioritize user experience, having a fast-loading website is essential for staying competitive in search rankings.
Here are key best practices you can use to optimize your website for performance.
Learn about these and other website optimization techniques in our guide to website optimization
Lazy Loading Images
Images are an important factor in website loading speed. An important way to speed up page load is to defer off-screen images. This is known as “lazy loading”—loading a resource only when it enters the user’s viewport. It is the opposite of “eager loading”—loading all web page resources immediately when the page is accessed, which is the default for most web frameworks. Lazy loading can be effective not only for images, but also for other resources that are not needed to render the currently visible portion of the page.
Optimize Delivery of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Minification reduces the size of CSS and JavaScript files, ensuring they load faster and use less bandwidth. It involves removing unnecessary text, such as code comments, white spaces, and variable names, that are not essential for the website’s functionality. While the time and bandwidth savings might not be massive for individual files, many web pages contain thousands of lines of code in HTML and scripts. Over time, minification can significantly improve page load times, making it an important strategy for optimizing overall website performance.
Utilize CDN
Content delivery networks (CDNs) maintain cached versions of content in various geographical locations called points of presence (PoPs). Each PoP houses multiple cache servers that deliver content to visitors from the nearest location. This reduces response times and significantly improves page load times by storing content closer to the user. CDNs are now easy to implement and are commonly provided out of the box by many hosting and cloud service providers, making it a straightforward and effective solution for optimizing website performance.
Reduce Redirects
In many cases, redirects are performed unnecessarily, such as when an internal page has moved, and other pages continue to link to its old location instead of updating them to point to the new address. The best practice is to always update web pages to link directly to the current address of other pages. To identify such issues, a web crawler can be used to generate a list of all pages on a website that link to redirected URLs, allowing developers to make necessary adjustments and eliminate unnecessary redirects.
Another common problem is chained redirects—a page links to an address, which redirects to another address, and possibly further to other addresses. Here the fix is to link directly to the final resolved URL, which can significantly reduce page load time for users who follow the link.
Remove or Optimize Plugins
Modern content management systems (CMS) support plugins, which can be highly useful for website owners. But many plugins also have a negative impact on page performance. If too many plugins need to be loaded, specific web pages or the website as a whole might slow down significantly.
It is important to evaluate plugins carefully and remove old, unwanted or ineffective ones. Even for the plugins a website really needs, it is important to select those that have the smallest possible impact on performance.
To see which plugins have the greatest impact on your site’s performance, selectively disable each one and measure performance on important pages. Although this process can be time-consuming, it helps you identify the “offending plugins” that are significantly hurting performance. Alternatively, some website performance scanners can automatically analyze plugins and generate a performance report for all plugins on a website, streamlining the identification of performance bottlenecks.
Optimize Images and Video
Optimizing the media displayed on your site goes a long way in ensuring visitors will find it on a search and, once they’re there, engage meaningfully.
To adopt automation capabilities and streamline your media-management workflow, consider a tool like Cloudinary’s Programmable Media, which optimizes both the quality and file size of media assets for automatic delivery, all without coding or manual work on your part. Plus, Cloudinary’s optimization technology can monitor media performance in a central hub for collaboration, ensuring the continued progress of your team’s web-performance enhancement and SEO efforts.
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