Page speed – how fast your website loads – immediately impacts user experience, as well as says a lot about how your website was built. Users typically won’t wait around or come back to a slow website and will commonly go to the next competitor or search result. Page speed is also a major factor in search engine algorithms, thus it’s important to make sure your website loads quickly.
Your website should have a fast load speed – ideally, under 3-5 seconds. Some common areas to focus on that could be slowing down your website are media size and compression (large image sizes are a common issue), server response time, caching, code structure, and code minification.
Depending on the platform the website is built on, there can be some limitations of areas you can make more efficient - in these cases focus on the things you can change to decrease load speed. Sometimes you do have to sacrifice media quality for a quicker site. Make sure to take a look at what plugins your websites is using and if it needs some of them at all. A lot of plugins and page builders can decrease load speed significantly. Make sure to use a properly configured caching plugin as well.
53% of mobile site visitors will abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. | |
A 100-millisecond delay in website load time can decrease conversion rates by 7%. |
Further Reading
Google PageSpeed Insights - Mobile & Desktop Speed Analysis
GTMetrix - Website Performance Testing
Bitcatcha - Server Response Speed Test
Moz Page Speed - Page Speed & SEO
TinyJpg - Compress Images With Minimal Quality Lost
How to resize and compress images for websites, without losing quality.
Is GoDaddy your hosting provider? They could be increasing your page load speed by 2+ seconds.