A site’s speed and performance can greatly impact your audience’s opinion of your site. If your site takes too long to load, visitors will click the “Back” button before you know it. There are a few factors that impact the speed and performance of your site. Here are a few things that factor into your site’s speed and performance:
Initial Response Time
Web servers are what supply the content for web browsers; what the browser requests, the server delivers through Internet network connections (Lifewire). A server expects a website to respond within 200ms to ensure that the page loads quickly.
Page Weight
Page weight is the size of all files needed to load your website. This includes images, videos, stylesheets, JavaScript, custom fonts, and any other external files. The smaller the overall page size, the quicker your site loads for the user. The quicker your site loads, the higher up your website appears in Google search result pages.
Number of Assets Loaded
Page assets include images, videos, stylesheets, JavaScript, custom fonts, and any other external files. The fewer assets that need to load, the quicker your site loads for the user. The quicker your site loads, the higher up your website appears in Google search result pages.
If your page loads slowly, there are a few quick wins that could get you sped up quickly. First look at the size and quantity of your site images, fonts, etc. When an image on a site is displayed very small but the original image is very large, the site still needs to load the larger file to display the image on the site. Also take a look at how many images and videos you have on your site, especially your home page. Having 10 videos on your home page isn’t usually helpful to your customers! Keep it simple and clean and your site will load quicker and make your customers happier.
To see how fast your page loads, check out: Caffeine Website Analyzer