Page Speed Optimisation

There is an important link between your page loading speed and the number of visitors to your website.

The Slower your website loading time, the higher the bounce rate of website visitors is likely to be.

A recent study from Geoff Kenyon gives us an insight into loading speeds across the web:

• If your website loads within a period of 5 seconds, that is faster than one quarter of websites across the internet.
• If your website loads within a period of 2.9 seconds, that is faster than half of websites across the internet.
• If your website takes just 1.7 seconds to load, then this is quicker than three quarters of the websites across the internet.
• If your website takes 0.8 seconds to load, then you have a website which is faster than over ninety four percent of the web.

Long page loading times can lead to bad first impressions for website visitors as well as lower conversion rates. Its vital that page loading speeds are optimised to allow for reasonable page loading speeds and improved SEO performance.

SEO performance is one of many factors that can be directly impacted by page speed optimisation.

The main way in which this happens is that search engines monitor the speed at which website pages are loading.

If a website is not loading quickly, this may indicate that less pages can be crawled by the search engines.

Less pages being crawled in conjunction with poor page loading times will likely lead to a drop in search rankings and poor SEO performance.

In order to ensure you can stay on top of your SEO performance you should follow some of the key steps listed below.

By default, websites store cached data and information for each website visitor to the website. Over time these caches can become congested and may result in decreased page speed loading times.

To improve page speed times, you may wish to improve page loading speeds through levered browser caching.

This process works by installing plugins to speed up and improve your website.

There are a variety of plugins available on platforms such as WordPress which you can use to improve your website loading times and search engine ranking performance.

Here are our key take home points for browser cache optimisation:

• Install plugins to reduce caching.
• Minimise use of third-party scripts.
• Use Google Analytics to leverage browser caching.

Reducing the size of images can be key to improving your page speed loading time. Use CSS sprites to ensure that a template is created for images across your website.

The sprites ensure that multiple images are grouped together into one image that loads much faster. This reduces the overall load on your website and allows for a smoother user experience and faster loading times on your site.

For the best image compression results, follow some of these steps:

• Use Webp image format where possible.
• Make use of scaled images.
• Ensure all images are compressed to suitable file sizes.