There is a saying that the first impression lasts, which is exceptionally relevant to websites. When we talk about the first impression, we don’t just talk about the website design or content. We also talk about one of the most critical determinants of a website’s success, i.e., page speed.
If a website takes too long to load, it can damage your reputation and cost you tons of money. You will not just lose out on revenue but also see an increased bounce rate. On the other hand, an efficient website is pivotal to a company's success. It increases your website traffic, online sales, and conversion rate.
The first step to developing a high-quality website is to rely on an effective website builder like Strikingly. However, your website development cycle doesn’t end here. You are responsible for ensuring that your website content doesn’t impact your performance.
What is Page Speed?
Page speed means how quickly your website content loads. There are many ways to measure page speed (such as speed index), but the best way to measure the loading speed is by time to interact.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Time to interact is defined by how long it takes for your website to load to the point where your site visitor can interact with it. This could be about clicking on the call to action (CTA), playing a video, or any actions users can take on a webpage.
You may ask what can be considered an ideal website speed. Although the answer to this question is based on your industry, it is recommended your website must load in less than 3 seconds. It is also important to note that page speed can vary across web pages and on mobile and desktop versions.
Importance of Improving Page Speed
1) Usability
It is common sense that the faster your pages load, the quicker your website will interact with your visitors. In this case, we are talking about loading items, such as the website menu, visual content, CTA buttons, etc. All of these elements allow your visitors to take action on your website. If these elements are visible and usable, it will result in happier and returning customers.
2) User Experience
Customers will be happy to interact with your website if they can go through the processes quickly. For example, if you have an eCommerce website and the checkout process takes more than a couple of seconds to load, your buyers may abandon the entire process. The same is the case with any action that customers take on your website, such as filling out forms or moving from one web page to another.
The website loading issues that hamper user engagement will have a long-term effect on the conversion rate and the traffic coming to your site.
3) Conversions and Search Engine Rankings
One of website owners' most significant objectives is the number of conversions. According to different studies, even a 0.1-second improvement in your website speed will bode well for your conversion rate, funnel progression, and user engagement. If the visitors cannot use your website’s features quickly, they won’t hesitate to move to the following website.
Google takes note of website speed, user experience, and SEO. Therefore, if you want your web pages to appear higher in the keyword search engine results, you have a better chance of making your pages appear to visitors.
Effective Ways to Improve Page Speed
1) Optimize Media
Large website images will not help you to improve page speed. For any website worldwide, image quality is crucial. However, it should create a balance with the website's performance. For this reason, there are ways to compress your images.
When you build your website, file types affect your site’s loading speed. You can save your images in the JPG version instead of PNG, as JPG files are smaller and faster to load. Another practice is uploading larger-sized images further down the page so the visitors can focus on your above content.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Nothing gets visitors more excited these days than GIFs. We all love them, but you must know that it is a huge factor in slowing down your page loading speed. Therefore, if you still plan to use them, make sure to add them to your web page's bottom sections. Limiting the number of frames in your animation has ensured that your design features don’t impact your page speed score. You can also go for videos as they take less space than animations.
According to Dan Shappir from Wix.com, the best way to improve your website performance is to reduce its complexity. The complexity of your website revolves around your website design and content, and moves into the functionality of your website.
2) Less Coding
Complex codes, or codes not formatted correctly, may also reduce your page speed. If you are a coding expert, make sure that you use simplified code so that Google can easily crawl your website. The best approach is to go for a website builder like Strikingly, where you don’t need to have any coding skills. It is all about letting your creative skills do the talking. You can build a quality website when you are focused on building creative designs with no coding skills.
3) Employing a CDN
A content distribution network (CDN) is a data center in different geographical locations. They deliver content to websites in respective regions. This improves the content delivery times and reduces the page speed.
CDNs are a network of servers (also called POPs) that collaborate to improve page speeds for the delivery of your website content. CDN effectively improves page speed whether your website uses HTML, JavaScript, stylesheets, images, or videos.
4) Using Lazy Load
Lazy load is used to delay the loading of website content or media which is not included in the user's initial view. This happens with numerous website builders, which usually use lazy loading throughout their web pages. You can play your role by placing high-resolution images or elements in the lower part of your website so that they are completely loaded before the visitors scroll down.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
You must know what elements load first on every section of your website. Prioritize the content on your homepage because your site visitor sees it once they land on your website. Make sure that you keep it simple but also impactful. It must be engaging content that allows your visitors to stay there for longer until the rest of the page is loading.
5) Deploy Caching
Automatic caching means that a particular portion of your website content is saved as initially seen by the visitors. Once they return to your website, that same content is displayed the same way. This is critical to increasing page speed and user experience (UX) because it reduces loading time as the saved content is delivered to repeat visitors.
6) Optimize Content
Content optimization can include a lot of factors. However, we will discuss the context of displaying your content on a web page that doesn’t negatively impact your page speed and loading time.
You can be conscious of the number of fonts on your website and their sizing. The more typefaces you add, the more variety you will have in color and size, and the more loading time will be. You can opt for a few solutions and stick with them. For example, you can build a website from scratch or optimize existing websites to improve page speeds.
Build a Fully-Functional Website on Strikingly
Image taken from Strikingly
Strikingly is a website builder constantly working to improve website statistics. Our technical staff has worked with different methodologies to increase page speed. Looking at the average of all established websites on Strikingly, we have a Google PageSpeed insight score of 90. A high Google Pagespeed Insight Score improves your search engine optimization (SEO) performance. It ensures that your visitors have a positive experience while going through your website's desktop or mobile versions.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Conclusion
Improving your page loading speed is critical for increasing your search engine rankings. To improve your website’s page speed, you create a list of best practices and rank them based on their impact on your website’s speed.
Although the Pagespeed insight score is not the most critical factor, it is a good idea to get to at least 50. However, you must pay attention to the loading time. A fully-functional website doesn’t take more than 3 seconds to load completely.
Although the smaller websites will benefit more from a shared server, you can host your website on custom tower servers if you are a more prominent company. As a website owner, you must have a good WiFi connection, compressed images, and transparency in your work.
Most importantly, you should rely on a quality website builder like Strikingly to build websites and maintain their performance. Create your free account on our platform today and build your online presence.
