by Table of Contents
What is Site speed?
Site speed is a metric that shows how fast and how responsive your website is when a visitor clicks on the url of your website, or a url of a page within your website.
It is perhaps one of the most important metrics in UX (User Experience) and it will definitely affect your SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.
Even for beginners, understanding the importance of your website’s speed is not rocket science.
Put yourself in your users’ shoes, a slow loading website is incredibly frustrating isn’t it? Why waste my precious time waiting for this website to load when there are hundreds if not thousands of alternative websites out there.
To simply put, the longer it takes for your website to load, the higher the chances that visitors will leave your website.
A slow site speed will result to a HIGH BOUNCE RATE and a LOW ENGAGEMENT RATE.
Bounce rate is is the rate at which viewers visit your website or blog then leave without engaging further with your content. A high bounce rate is not ideal as it means that people don’t stay too long, or they don’t click on other pages in your website.
Engagement rate, on the other hand, is a metric that tracks your user’s interaction with your website. Engagement can be in the form of likes, shares, comments and clicks to other pages within your website. Ideally what you want is to have a HIGH engagement rate because it means that your users actually care about your content and it’s highly probable that they will come back.
High bounce rate + a low engagement rate = website killer
You know that it simply is not working when you see a high bounce rate and a low engagement rate.
What you want for the long term is for your users to come back, but just by looking at these metrics, your users are practically saying that your website just doesn’t cut it.
But how slow is too slow?
Did you know that the average online user’s attention span when using a mobile device is 8 seconds.
8 SECONDS.
And did you know that the average attention span of a gold fish is 9 seconds?
It’s ridiculous but it’s the truth. The average online user browsing via a mobile phone has an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish.
There’s a more shocking news to that. According to a research conducted by Google, 53% of users leave a website if the loading time is longer than 3 seconds.
That’s right. 3 SECONDS!
It’s mostly like speed dating isn’t it. Grabbing your users’ attention has to be catchy, glitzy and most importantly FAST.
That’s why we can’t stress enough how important website speed optimization is for your website.
Free Website Speed Tools
There are a plethora of helpful website speed tools out there that will help you determine if you need to improve on speed optimisation.
Ubersuggest
I use the Site Audit functionality from Ubersuggest to not only check my site’s On-page SEO score and generate keywords, but also to check my site speed.
Just go to Ubersuggest -> enter your site url -> Search
or
Look at the left column of the page, under SEO Analyzer click on SITE AUDIT -> enter your site’s url -> Search
According to Ubersuggest’s Site Analyzer, my website’s loading time for desktop users is 8 seconds. It’s in between Fair and Poor which suggests that I need to improve on my site optimisation to decrease the loading time. This is probably the culprit why my site also has a high bounce rate.
What I want is an excellent score- a loading time of just under 3 seconds.
For my website’s performance, speed and responsiveness for mobile devices, it rates pretty poorly at 9 seconds! This means that I’m wasting all that traffic from mobile devices. A poor rating means that I have to fix this immediately as this will affect my site’s overall SEO health.
PageSpeed Insights by Google
PageSpeed Insights by Google is one of my favorite tools to use to check my site speed. What I love the most about PageSpeed Insights is that it gives us suggestions and opportunities to help our site load faster.
Go to PageSpeed Insights by Google -> enter your site’s url -> Analyze
You’ll be able to see your score and you can assess your site’s performance according to these metrics:
- 0-49 = POOR
- 50-89 = NEEDS IMPROVEMENT
- 90-100 = EXCELLENT
The ideal score for a fast site speed should of course range in between 90-100.
For my site’s desktop speed, it generated a score of 86 or NEEDS IMPROVEMENT. They also gave a breakdown of how they calculated my site’s speed like Speed Index, Time to Interactive, Total Blocking Time, etc.
Under Opportunities, you’d see that Google recommends that I REDUCE INITIAL SERVER RESPONSE TIME or SRT. By doing so, I’d be able to reduce 1.19 seconds from my current site’s loading time.
Server Response Time is the amount of time your server responds from an action from your browser.
Slow SRT’s are usually caused by a cheap and unreliable web hosting. Of course, when you’re just starting out, a cheap web hosting is fine, but as you grow traffic over time, you’ll need to upgrade your hosting.
For my site’s mobile speed, it fares even worse at a score of 70. It definitely NEEDS IMPROVEMENT.
5 Ways to Increase Site Speed and Decrease Loading Time
1. Optimize your images
Images can definitely slow down your website and the best solution to this is to compress your image file size. Of course, you wouldn’t want to sacrifice image quality as it is also integral to capturing your visitor’s attention.
There are several ways to compress image size while maintaining its quality.
You can definitely do this via photoshop like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp, but you might be wasting hours especially if you’re just a beginner or if you don’t have editing skills.
Luckily for us there are various online tools that would help you compress image sizes in JPEG or even PNG forms in no time! I personally use Optimizilla, ImageSmaller, and Compressor.io and they work great. They’re completely free, no sign-up needed and you don’t have to download anything to be able to edit your images.
2. Choose a reliable hosting provider
Your hosting provider can make or break your website’s speed performance.
Most beginners make the mistake of choosing the cheapest web hosting provider because they think they can save up more. Of course this is not to imply that cheap is synonymous to bad quality. There are plenty of hosting providers out there – like Bluehost, Hostgator and SiteGround to name a few- that are economical and are known for being reliable.
When choosing your hosting service provider, the cost isn’t the only thing that you should consider. You also have to research on the hosting provider’s server location as it can affect a site’s loading time. For example, If your visitors are from Europe, you might want to consider getting a server located within Europe as the loading time can be faster within proximity than if you’d get a cheap server from the US.
Another important thing to take into account is choosing between a shared hosting or a VPS (Virtual Private Server).
As the name implies, shared hosting would mean that you would have to share servers with other people. And since you’re all sharing on the same resources, that’d definitely slow down your site’s loading time.
For beginners, shared hosting is fine because you don’t have much traffic. But as your site gets more traction, you should consider getting a VPS or a Virtual Private Server as gives you a dedicated server that allows you to have a consistently fast loading time.
3. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
As mentioned above, server location and your user’s proximity to the server can affect your website’s loading time. To solve this problem, the CDN or Content Delivery network caches content like images, CSS and Javascript files in different locations across the globe so your users can access that content in the server nearest to them. As a result, the CDN’s will drastically increase your site performance and speed.
Content Delivery Networks will also improve your website’s security but of course, CDN’s are a bit more costly than the regular web host server providers.
One of the most popular CDN’s or Content Delivery Networks is Cloudflare. It promises 2x times faster loading times. Cloudflare offers a free plan for hobbyists and aside from the Global Content Delivery Network, you’ll have a Ddos attack mitigation and free email support.
Other notable CDN’s are Amazon’s Cloudfront and Stackpath (or previously known as MaxCDN).
4. Only use quality wordpress plugins
When I was just starting out, I didn’t realise that I was enthusiastically installing dozens of plugins for my new WordPress website. I was thinking that I needed all those features to make my blogging life easier for me in the long run. What I didn’t know was that plugins did slow down my website; and thus, it affected my site’s engagement rate and bounce rate.
When choosing a plugin, you should always check on user reviews and only install those that are always updated by their developers to ensure compatibility with the WordPress version you are using.
Do not keep a dormant plugin. Delete them if possible. Do not activate plugins if you don’t need them.
Check for plugins that might be doing the same tasks. For example, when I was a newbie I made the mistake of installing both Yoast SEO and XML sitemap. They were overriding each other and slowing down my website. I had to delete one of them and my site speed improved.
5. Use a fast and lightweight theme
While you’d want an aesthetically appealing theme with fancy icons, elements and widgets to immediately grab your visitor’s attention, a bloated wordpress theme can slow down your website’s loading time.
You don’t have to sacrifice those features just for the sake of speed optimisation of course, but what you’d want is a WordPress theme that is lightweight but feature-rich and most importantly up-to-date with the version of WordPress that you are using. If your website is running on a dated theme or an older version of WordPress, you’re exposing your site to vulnerabilities and possible attacks.
There are a lot of free and premium lightweight wordpress themes like Neve, Divi, Bimber, Schema, Newspaper that are SEO friendly, have a fast loading time while also giving you plenty of design options depending on your needs.
