Is Your Website Loading Times Meeting User Expectations?

When creating a website there are many factors that must be taken into account, all of which have the end user or customer in mind. Such as the design, usability, layout, color schemes and many more all have an impact on how someone interacts and uses the site.

Having an efficient and well made website will allow for fast load times and enable users who will likely have a greater experience and may spend more time on the site. Although this is just a small part of website design it is also a part that is often overlooked.

Many consider page loading times important and if it exceeds 6 seconds then expect a high bounce rate and low conversions as most people will move on very quickly. Especially now that broadband has increased user expectations.

An example of this can be seen from Google who have always maintained a simple home page without any unnecessary graphics or icons. Enabling them to maintain a fast and efficient website with minimal load times that as a result was better than their competitors and allowed the end user to find the information they were looking for faster and easier.

To begin with if you are making a website that is going to be optimised for search engines remember that the loading time of a website is taken into account within Google's search ranking algorithms. This is because Google only wants relevant and quality links to appear within their search engine results pages, as a result anything considered slow will struggle to become near the top results.

How To Measure The Speed?

So what can you do to help improve your loading times?

Firstly it will be important to view your current websites performance and ensure you are within the targeted 1-3 seconds and to help set a benchmark to see if the following changes have any effect.

Google themselves offer a site performance tool within the webmaster tools. This will enable the webmaster to view the speed of the site as experienced by users. There are many others that exist and are very useful whilst giving similar results, for example Pingdom and WebSiteOptimization.com are two well known alternatives.

What Changes To Implement?

1. Optimise Images – Start by removing any unnecessary images and always compress images before uploading to your website to reduce the overall file size. Also use the correct format such as PNG, GIF and JPEG where appropriate.

2. Validation – Always validate and minimize CSS and HTML wherever possible

3. Stylesheets - Ensure style sheets are at the top and any code is at the bottom.

4. HTTP Requests - Minimize the number of HTTP requests by limiting the number of files required to display your website.

5. Web hosting – It is vital that your web host is close to your location, by carrying out a ping test you can find out if a new host is causing any problems in terms of loading speed.

Once all the changes have been implemented go back to the webmaster tools including Google Analytic s and see for yourself if the performance has been improved.

Although the website may be faster at loading it will not effect everything straight away, but can ensure that the user experience is flawless and help you begin with increasing your sites conversion rate optimisation. If the current bounce rate figure is high, then this could help reduce that figure and to keep users and customers wanting to re-visit the site.