Importance of Website Speed

The time required by website to load completely is called website speed or page speed. Speed of a web page can be affected by many factors such as design, web host and server location.

When it comes to accessing websites, loading speed matters a lot for users because the average time people take to judge a website is only few seconds. Slow websites affect user experience and make them frustrated. A slow website doesn’t even show up in the Google search results because of its low rankings.

Factors Which Effect the Loading Time

Selling too Many Ads
Having ads can generate additional revenues for the website but at the same time having too many ads can ruin the site performance. Optimizing the number of ads per page and serving ads to the targeted customers is essential to generate good ad revenues. For better management of ad space and ad inventory, website owners can opt for third party ad serving solutions.

Cheap Web-Hosting
A free or cheap web hosting is typically a shared hosting where a common server is used to host many websites. Having too many websites connected to a single server can increase the load on server and make the site perform low. Websites that seek better performance need to opt for a quality web hosting services.

HD Content
In order to make high quality content, many times lot of HD images and graphics are used in the websites. These high definition images and videos have big file sizes, and take much time to load from server.

Widgets
Widgets are software programs used for specific functionality in a website. It is third party software that can be used in a website, blog or mobile applications. Having too many widgets affect the performance of website and delay the loading of webpage content.

Lengthy Code
Using lengthy CSS code is another hindrance for site speed. Websites include CSS code in their HTML to bring many variations in the web page design and layout. However, usage of too much CSS code can increase the load on server and make the website run very slow.

How to Improve Web Page Speed

Quality Web Hosting
Good web hosting server is the first step in improving the site speed. A cheap web hosting service may not provide the resources that are essential to run your website without interruption. Having a professional web hosting configuration can help a lot in decreasing the page load time and improving its performance.

Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
As name suggested content delivery network refers to distribution of data with high speed from the local area networks. It delivers heavy media and other web page content from the local servers so that the user will have faster access to the web page. Since the content is cached at the local CDN servers, there is less chance for slow delivery of website content.

Minimize HTTP Request
If your page is using images, style sheets, and flashy content then multiple HTTP requests are to be made to the server for each one of these elements before it renders the complete web page. This will take more time than a palin HTML code and will increase the page load time. Hence it is essential to work on the page design to optimize it for better performance.

Don’t Use Complex Apps and Plugins
Using too many third party applications and social share plugins can make the site very slow in its performance. They not only exhaust server resources but significantly take longer amount of time to load. If usage of plugin is necessary, better look for alternatives that is simple and faster in loading.

Compression Technique
Instead of loading the pages with bulky images and videos, better use the compressed file formats for faster access. Compressed formats load the images quicker than bulky file sizes. Using compressed file formats will decrease the load on server and provide faster access to the web page.