The search giant Google gives utmost importance to page speed while ranking, which is why it is imperative that your page loads as fast as possible. As the name suggests, page loading time is the time taken by a page to load. But, there is a lot that goes behind making a page load faster.
When you click a URL in your browser window, the browser sends the request for the page’s information to the server via the internet network. Now, the server has hosted a number of websites within its home. So, manually it will take forever to find the exact page that has been requested, but with technology, the process becomes instant. The web page is instantly located in the server’s database. Once located, the server sends all the files of the requested page back to the browser through the internet network. The browser window then starts to load and render the web content, and displays the web page to the user. Now, all of this process takes only seconds to be executed!
With so many components and levels involved, the page loading time depends on all such factors like the bandwidth of the internet network, the performance of the hosting server, the location of the requested browser, the server placement, and all elements present on the website like images, videos, infographics, etc.
More than 50% of the internet users get frustrated even if a page takes 3 or more seconds to load. They will immediately abandon the page and go to another website, meaning all your efforts gone down the drain! Thus, you need to have your website load in just a blink of an eye. If not, you will see a significant drop in the traffic and in turn, the revenue. A one second delay in page loading speed drops the interest of users by 5%; and a three second delay drops the interest by 7%. Also, pages having slower speed are also seen to have lesser subscribers. In fact, even if a page’s loading speed is reduced by only 5%, traffic can be increased by a whopping 5 million!
Now if you are motivated enough to improve your website speed, you need to first analyze your website speed, so that you know whether you need to improve it or not. To measure this, there are various tools that can help you. These include the Google Page Speed Insights, Pingdom, and GTmetrix. Once you calculate your page speed and identify that you need to improve it, here are some tips that you can use.
- First and foremost, keep your website pages lightweight and simple. Avoid more of images, videos, and other unnecessary rich media elements.
- How many ever images, optimize them to the best. Compress the image files, but make sure to not compromise on the quality.
- Cache your website to reduce the load on the browser.
- Use Content Delivery Networks if you have clients in various regions of the world that can act as mini servers so that browsers can connect to them faster.
Along with all of these basic practices, there is a lot more that can be done. But for this, you will need the help of a digital marketing company in Bangalore, who will not only help you with your page load speed, but many other aspects of your website regarding your SEO, which will help you rank higher than your competitors on Google.
