Site speed effects many things and ultimately effects the way your business is getting promoted. Site speed effects metrics like search ranking, conversion, page views, bounce rate and ultimately revenues of your site. If your site loads slowly and the customers has to wait then they might get frustrated and go to some other better and similar business site, for them it’s just switching to other site, but for you it’s your potential customer that is getting lost. A fast speed website gives confidence to visitor; they trusts your site and makes a way for them to tell others about your site.
Website Speed matters?
Most of the visitors want the page to be loaded within 2 seconds. 50% of the visitors and mobile site users will go to other sites if it takes longer than 3 seconds for the site to load. A site which loads faster has happy customers and their sites are valued more than other sites. Speed depends on how you design your site, from the beginning only, site should be designed smartly and harmful practices are to be avoided that affects site’s loading speed.
How to improve website speed?
Your pages or site should have fewer things to load i.e. smaller images, optimized CSS delivery, and usage of asynchronous scripts, avoid plugins and use lesser font size and types etc. Wikipedia is the best example which is a simple and fast website which loads data as soon as you click for search. It has millions of pages yet everything loads smoothly and speedily. Other things that are to be taken care of while designing a site are:
Use minimalistic design.
Smaller images
Lighter and smaller web forms.
Lazy loading can be used where data can be loaded when user scrolls to that place.
Use Google tools that recommend best practices and tools to get better and faster loading time.
Optimize your servers
Your site’s content is not the only one that affects the speed of your website, servers are equally responsible. If your servers are slow and you optimize your pages with all the resources you can then also overall speed of site will be slow. Thus speeding your server is as important as the speed of your pages. Ways to do so are:
Cache the content.
Improve web server software and configurations.
Make pages lighter with fewer resources.
Use CDN (content delivery network)
Faster sites get more visitors, readers and business
By using the above tips to design your site, you will get more visitors, happier clients who will be impressed by your site and design skills and thus more customers/business coming your way.