As web developers it is one of our goals to make web pages load as quickly as possible for the following reasons: - Bounce Rate reduction: Customers leave a slow website and move on to a competitors - Increase conversion rate - Maximising onsite SEO benefits with search engines as they prefer fast websites - Minimising web server load so that your web server can handle more visitors
One of the major tools we use for this purpose if Google PageSpeed. The link below will let you use the insight services
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
Across various internet usage studies the overall results are quite consistent and as follows:
- Around 1/3 of website visitors will abandon a website that hasnt loaded between 1 and 5 seconds
- When visitors encounter a slow website, between a 1/3 and ½ of them would not use the website again
- Around ¼ actively go off to a competitor website to complete their purchase
- Mobile website visitors are slightly more willing to wait initially but quickly drop off if the page takes 6+ seconds to load
Main reference (http://www.gomez.com/wp-content/downloads/GomezWebSpeedSurvey.pdf)
As you can see in the screenshot below of the web design page that we have designed and developed with Start Your Own Business it received a Google PageSpeed score of 87/100. These results can vary by 1-2 points generally in running the tests depending on the number of visitors using the web server.
As you can see above Google checks a large number of factors when it examines your web page.
These ideally need to be green ticks, even green ticks can contain items that need improving.
Very common issues are:
- Images without the dimensions set (this takes the browser longer to render the page)
- Images need resizing for display (e.g. the page uses a 100x100 pixel image for a 50x50 pixel space, this means the browser has to spend time changing the picture to a scaled size)
- Uncompressed JavaScript, minifying the JavaScript resources to reduce their size
As with all things there are occasionally situations where to achieve a certain effect a general rule may not be met and this is a case of working out the overall impact.
Overtime, with the changing of web page copy content and design layout the score can change and should be checked as part of best practice.
To find out more information on this see the extended article here (http://www.chittak.co.uk/articles/google-page-speed )
To read more about our work with Start Your Own Business click here to see the case study (http://www.chittak.co.uk/casestudy-syob.php )
If you need help improving your score please call us on 01202 611 711 or email us via help@chittak.co.uk
Trevor Clarke
Chittak Ltd
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