Page Speed: It’s Actually Important
Posted by aonenetworks On January 4, 2013
Your website is not the roadways: speeding won’t kill you. In fact, purposefully making your pages load faster will help impatient customers find what they’re looking for that much faster – not to mention the fact that Google ranks you on your page speed. You actually get penalized if you aren’t fast enough, and your customers may find something else to look at while they wait for your page to load – which might just be a competitor. Here are a few ways to speed up your pages today.
Figure Out How Slow Your Website Loads
Do you even know how long your website takes to load? You can’t base your judgment on how fast your computer loads it, unfortunately, but there are a number of websites that analyze your speed for you. If you have Google Analytics, there’s a tool there that allows you to test your speed. Otherwise, you can try Pingdom, WebPageTest.org or the Gomez Website Performance test.
Figure Out Why it Loads at That Speed
Is your front page slow to load (more than ten seconds)? If so, why? There are a couple of things to consider. First, pages which consist of mostly text load the fastest. If your front page is picture- or video-heavy (this includes ads), then it’s likely you’re going to have a ton of trouble ever getting the load to speed up. Pictures take longer to load and sometimes, text can do a better job at expressing an idea. Try to stick to one, maybe two pictures, with a lot of color in the background to express your creativity instead. Otherwise, use text to bring people in, not fancy, slow-loading photos.
Fix It
You may need the help of a professional to fix your slow pages, but at the very least you can do some research and see what can be done to improve your website speed.
