If you’re a business, having a slow website could be costing you money by missing potential leads or sales.
In today’s day and age, sluggish loading speeds are increasingly likely to send someone searching elsewhere for the same information, rather than stay and wait for a page to load.
This is why it’s important to pay attention to site speed as you look to attract users and keep them coming back. Site speed not only creates a better experience for your users on your site, but it’s also more likely to keep them there so they can take the actions you want them to take.
At Webspec, our digital marketing team and web developers are experienced in diagnosing and fixing site speed issues. But when we talk about site speed, what exactly are we talking about? And what do you do if you’ve got a sluggish site? Let’s take a closer look at what it is, why it’s important, and some ways to fix it.
What Is Site Speed?
“Site speed” refers to how fast your page loads and how quickly it responds to the actions users take while they’re on the page. There are several metrics you can use to measure different aspects of your website’s speed. Checking them and seeing what’s slowing each of them down is a good place to start in fixing your site speed.
Google’s Core Web Vitals, which reports on the page experience on your site, tracks three of those metrics. Those metrics are:
- Largest Contentful Paint
- Interaction to Next Paint
- Cumulative Layout Shift
We know, those aren’t exactly the most user-friendly names, so here’s what each of them means:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
The Largest Contentful Paint metric measures your load speed by tracking how fast the largest image or block of text on your webpage takes to load. Google recommends that the LCP falls within 2.5 seconds.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
Interaction to Next Paint shows how interactive your site is. The metric measures how long it takes for the page to respond to user interactions throughout the user’s journey on the page. Google recommends this measurement to be under 200 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Cumulative Layout Shift measures how steady the visual elements are on your page as it loads. Have you ever tried to click on a link at the top of a webpage just as an ad finished loading, and it bumped what you wanted down? Super frustrating. That’s what this measures. Google recommends your CLS value falls under 0.1.
Why Is Site Speed Important?
Why should you check on your site speed? Let’s take a look at a few reasons it’s so important.
- Site Speed Is a Google Ranking Factor
Google confirmed that page speed is a ranking factor in 2018. While Google has made many updates since then, page speed still plays a role in helping content appear higher up on Google, factoring into what Google refers to as “page experience.” As you’re looking to stand out from your competitors in the crowded digital marketing landscape, upping your page speed could play into your strategy to differentiate yourself.
- Site Speed Keeps Users on Your Site
When users don’t have to wait on your website, they’re more likely to stay around. For example, a Google study found that mobile users are 32% more likely to bounce off a website — meaning they exit quickly without taking any other actions — if the page loads in three seconds, versus one second. If the page loads in five seconds, rather than one second, that increase in probability is 90%.
- Site Speed Encourages Conversions
Site speed doesn’t just encourage users to stay on your site, it also encourages them to take action. A number of studies have linked page loading time to increased conversion rates. For example, a 2020 study commissioned by Google found that speeding mobile sites by one-tenth of a second increased conversions by 8.4% on retail sites and 10.1% on travel sites. A study of Walmart’s website found that improving a page’s loading speed by 1% increased their conversions by 2% — not an insignificant amount for a company that does tens of billions of dollars in online sales each year.
How to Measure Your Site Speed
As we’ve seen, enhancing your site speed has the potential to bring more users to your site and encourage them to complete the actions you want to take while they’re there.
So how do you measure it? There are a few tools from Google that we find useful in diagnosing site speed issues.
Google Core Web Vitals Report
Google’s Core Web Vitals is a report available within Google Search Console. This report uses data collected from your site’s actual users to provide information on how well your URLs are improving. It will provide information on groups of URLs and show you whether they are performing well or poorly, along with what metrics need improvement.
PageSpeed Insights Tool
Google’s PageSpeed Insights is another report that measures user experience on your website’s pages. While Core Web Vitals uses real user data, PageSpeed Insights combines real user data with lab data, which uses a controlled environment to measure your website’s performance. PageSpeed Insights allows you to drill down into individual URLs to see how they are performing.
Google Lighthouse
While PageSpeed Insights uses both lab and real-user data, Google’s Lighthouse tool uses only lab data to measure the performance of individual URLs and make recommendations on specific fixes that could enhance your site speed. You can use Lighthouse as a Google Chrome browser extension and run reports on your pages as you visit them.
Ways to Improve Your Site Speed
Using tools to examine your site speed will help you identify what may be causing problems. Now, it’s time to fix those problems. Here are some of the major ways that you might be able to improve your site speed.
Reducing Unused Code & Minifying Code
You can speed up your site by removing libraries, plugins, or other unused code elements. You can also reduce the size of your code by using a tool or optimization plugin in WordPress to minimize it.
Caching
Caching, or temporarily storing frequently used files so they can load quickly when needed, can help improve site speed. Using browser HTTP cache keeps browsers from needing to re-download important elements each time a user visits the page.
Logical Ordering of Content
Putting your most important code at the top of your page and unused or less important code in the footer will keep browsers from spending valuable time on page elements that aren’t as important to the page experience.
Optimizing Your Images
Image files can bog down a site, which is why using an optimized image format like “WebP,” which is smaller in size than JPEG or PNG but just as rich in quality, is ideal for reducing your load time.
Using a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) uses servers around the globe to store copies of your site’s files. By doing so, it can deliver your site to users from whatever server is closest to them. Using a physically closer server will help to reduce the response time. Webspec offers CDN services for free to sites that host with us.
Ready to Speed up Your Website? Put It in the Hands of Our Site Speed Experts.
Whether you’re launching a new website or enhancing your current one, Webspec can bring the knowledge and experience to help you look for ways to improve your site speed and optimize your web performance. Contact us today to get in touch with our team of digital marketing and web development experts.