Powering up Pagespeed

Pagespeed is an important factor for any website. A slow website will obviously make visitors less likely to want to stay and browse the website, especially if they have to change pages frequently.

Websites can load slowly due to a large number of internal and external factors. We only have control over the Internal factors.

Internal

• Website Design and Structure
• Server Performance
• Content Management System (CMS)
• Images and Multimedia
• Code Efficiency

External

• User’s Internet Connection
• Geographic Location
• Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Third-Party Scripts and Services
• Browser and Device Differences

Page speed has become such an important factor in web visits that Search Engines. Google and Bing, among others, will penalise websites that load slowly and show them further down on their results page. Because of this even if your website seems like it loads fast enough, it may still be worth improving it’s speed. Google can detect smaller changes in speeds better than people can so still may be punishing you.

Fortunately, using Google Search Console, we can find out whether Google has any problems with your websites speed. It uses real user data which is difficult to replicate in a lab, because of this a website can be extremely fast but if something is stopping users being able to experience it quickly then it will still be considered slow.

We check our websites frequently to ensure they’re running as fast as possible. We track our sites speeds using Google Search Console. It’s a brilliant tool that can tell you that there may be problems on your website before users can notice and before google have started lowering your ranking.

We were notified that some of our websites had started loading slowly for end users, fortunately a warning comes long before they action anything and there’s a fair window of speed that it will give you a warning for before it starts reducing website visibility. It also often comes before people start complaining, so we weren’t aware of any page speed issues before this point.

We were able to use Google Search Console and Page speed insights to gather information from actual users and some lab test figures to try and improve. Of course all of our websites are optimised but this helped highlight some key areas that we can help improve.

Performance

Accessibility

Best Practices

SEO

Performance

We needed to use different fixes for each website. One thing we noticed across the board, however, was that we were loading resources before we needed to. When a website loads there’s actually no need to load any of the page that the user can’t see, fortunately there are ways to create a website that loads as you use it!

Using Ajax we’re able to load the part of the screen that the user can see, then if the user moves the screen it requests the new information necessary for the screen from the server, so the screen is loaded as it’s viewed. This brings the load time down greatly and creates a much more pleasurable user experience.

We also had websites loading high quality video on their home screens initial view. This was causing problems for load times but particularly on mobile, where we could be serving a much smaller video at the same quality. Serving smaller videos to smaller screens is a brilliant way to save bandwidth and increase page speed. We now have separate video files for different screen sizes and a placeholder which loads with the screen, the video then loads afterwards in the correct size for the screen.

There are two main ways that your business will benefit from a faster page speed.

Having a fast page speed means that customers are much more likely to stay on your website. Whether trying to shop online, view your opening hours, contact your, or action anything on your website, it being fast is key for a good experience.

With Google punishing websites that have a lower page speed can your business really afford not to? Improving your sites page speed can help your online business strive. The more views you get on Search Engines, the more likely you are to get organic customers to your website in the first place.

We had previously optimized the websites we were working on, which made us aware that we had covered most of the basics for page speed optimization. For your website we would look through every possible opportunity to optimise to give your website the fastest page speed possible. As optimisation goes down over time when technology changes we also offer a service where we monitor the health of your website and ensure it will always appear optimal to Google, like we’ve done above.

If you would like us to optimise your website’s speed then get in touch! Send over your URL and tell us you want us to upgrade your websites page speed and we’ll give you a quote.