What is page load speed?
Page load speed is time is takes for contents of a page to load completely.
Which is, the time is takes for anyone to enter your URL in browser(or clicks a link), press enter till the home page loads completely.
To understand how it experiences your reader’s experience, imagine that loading comments screen you see on facebook.
Now, facebook, youtube, instagram & more are huge tech companies and most of their users (us) are addicted to one thing or other on them.
But, even with that addiction, if sometimes it takes too long, our urge to see that content starts to wane. And sometimes, we just drop the idea.
This is our nature. Human nature. Inbuilt. And, with number of choices available to us, we will simply switch to other option.
To other website, which will load faster, even if the design or font is not something we like that much.
How about articles at medium loading slower? See the point of page loading speed.
Factors effecting page load speed & what you can do about them:
As a website is hosted on a server, when your server receives request to display the web page, it sends everything related to that page to the requester.
This brings in lots of factors into the play, like server location, network quality, page design and in the end amount of data to be transferred.
There are few factors which are beyond your control, but then they effect everyone, so it doesn’t matter much. Like internet speed of your visitor is not something you can predict or control.
Still, as you will learn shortly, there are adjustments which you can code into your website.
The factors, which are in your control are:
- Website Design : Be minimalistic about using extra effects, plugins, animation on your website. Every line of code that you add to your page, adds up to this loading time of your web page. Like, using properly coded themes.
- Images: Use of properly formatted, compressed images can shave of ‘seconds’ off the page loading time. So, go easy on those high resolution multiple images! Or hosting them or Amazon S3 or CDN (will learn about it in a bit)
- Cache validator : A cache validator tells the browser ( of visitor of the website) which part of web page to be loaded each time and what can be skipped from reloading as the information is still same. Caching can be at server level or via plugin (in case of Wordpress)
- Hosting: This one goes without saying that a good hosting solution is paramount for good page load speed(among other important factors).
- CDN: Unless your website is geographically hosted closer to majority of viewers, a cloud distribution network helps a lot in good website browsing experience.
Solutions
The good news is that, with little bit of research and planning, most of these factors can be handled with ease.
There are plenty of good well, well explained, articles online detailing into steps you can take to increase page load speed and how to do it. Here are two of them:
The main point is, you can’t optimize everything, as it will take focus away from what the website is all about. There are few main things that you need to take care of.
These are the important factor that effects your website, regardless of platform you choose for your website:
Hosting:
Hosting as solution is dependent on service provider. No need to go for most expensive package.
Simple shared hosting for static sites and managed hosting for wordpress is more then enough.
For hosting you can try out the recommended hosting solutions and see which one suits you.
When you choose managed hosting (premium as compared to shared hosting), then you get the benefits of additional server side optimization with regard to platform you will be using.
Theme:
If you are coding your own theme, then just be careful about one thing: Don’t go overboard with fancy look of the site. Each feature require additional backend, which will only add into the files to be loaded before the page is loaded.
Thus, adding to page load speed.
Besides, unless your website is all about website designing itself, your user is coming for content on your site. The theme should focus on enhacing the presentation of that content. Even Google is all about user experience.
Or
You can buy a well optimized premium theme. It saves a lot of trouble, as these theme are well supported by their developers. You can rather focus your efforts in developing other parts of your website.
Moreover, many of these themes(like thrive themes for Wordpress) come with extra features like page builder, social share plugins etc. inbuilt into them. Thus providing features, without installing special plugins.
CDN(Cloud Distribution Network):
Cloud Distribution Network or CDN is a distribution network for content. The static content of your website. Like theme files, images etc.
A CDN solution stores a copy of these files on its servers which are present at multiple locations. Then it serves these files from the server which is closes to the visitor who is visiting your website. Thus reducing time it takes to serve website content.
One of the most common CDN is Cloudflare. And the reason is that it’s free version is good enough for most basic websites. Moreover, many website hosting solutions provide one-click option to integrate Cloudflare with your website.
There are other premium options available too, with extra features. If your website is serving more than 2 countires, it makes sense to invest in a CDN.
Is it enough?
Quite frankly, No.
The points mentioned above are what you will get inbuilt in most of hosting solution, but still you will lots of difference in the way most of website are experienced by users.
Take for example, medium.com itself. This is one of the biggest publication on internet currently with more than 50 million users per month.
Now if you check Medium.com on Google page load insights, then the results will make you wonder:
Still the user experience is awesome and numbers are the proof.
The reason is that team behind medium.com works day and night to make the experience awesome.
It is as simple as that.
So what does that mean for you?
It means, go through your website like a visitor who is new and has little interest in technology behind the site. Go through the flow of the content, buttons, placements, color scheme etc.
Then remove (if you had already added) anything that doesn’t serve the basic purpose of the viewer.
Remember, it is their experience that matters. After all this topic of page load speed came from loading speed on visitors device only.
From my experience, a lot of page loading speed depends on how website is designed: theme, plugins and effects etc. You sort that out and this factor is taken care of
PS: With increasing users, Medium has worked hard to provide content a quite fast speed. A good CDN and properly optimized server is the key.
Responsive website
Another factor that effects page loading speed is proper responsiveness of any website.
Anyone who is accessing your website from mobile device is more interested in information that the content is providing and not in the any of the fancy effects.
A well designed responsive website takes care of these issues but having media breakpoints a correct pixels as well as not loading certain elements on mobile devices at all.
How responsive website effects page load speed?
Despite the improved connection speed, a mobile has limited processing power as compared to a laptop or desktop. Which means if content provided is optimized for mobile, it will be processed faster. A responsive website is just that, a content which is optimized according to viewer.
Thus, reducing the data and processing of that, which is required for loading of page and information on a mobile device.
Moreover, as you can see from google page insights (and elsewhere) that google give higher priority of mobile optimized websites. Thus it helps in your page ranking too.
Conclusion
Aah, the conclusion.
Page load speed is an important factor but this is not the only factor.
And there is so much you can do about it.
Following statement may sound counter to everything I mentioned above but still it holds true:
Don’t fret yourself into trying to reach 100/100 rating on pageload insights.
Anything above 80 is good enough. After that, you should focus on user experience and how you present the content.
So, if you are designing your website yourself, buy a good theme, modify it as per your website and get going.
Over time, you can always improvise depending on the feedback you receive!
It will be kind of you to share your thoughts in comment section below or press the clap button to encourage :)
Originally published at Tinkoor.
