The Monster of Website Optimization – The Slow Page Speed Monster

If this is what your visitors see when they visit your website, they have almost no other choice than to leave your site. An unmistakable sign that the next monster of daily optimization has attacked: The slow page speed monster!

Nothing will sour your users on a first visit more than a slow loading time. Next to a poor user experience, every millisecond more of loading time can mean losses in sales for online shop operators. It is essential that your website has a fast page speed.

According to a study from kissmetrics, almost half of Internet users expect a loading time of less than two seconds. If the loading takes more than three seconds, 40 percent of users will leave. The shorter the loading time, the higher the stay time of the user and thus the lower the bounce rate.

We will show what you can do when the slow page speed monster is plaguing you.

Our Monster-Destroying Practical Example:

When accessing a website, visitors expect powerful images together with technically-perfect functionality and qualitatively high-quality content. But the longer these elements take to load, the slower the entire website loads.

From the diagram from the http-archive in figure 1, it is clear that image and video data make up approximately a quarter of the 2533 kB of average site size. If the display of images is delayed, reading flow and user experience are diminished.

Figure 1: httparchive, 2017

Instead, images should be compressed before insertion and formatted correctly. For this, you can use an image processing program such as Gimp. Store high-resolution photos as JPEG; small graphics as GIFs.

The study by httparchive also shows the average size of individual file formats.

Figure 2: httparchive, 2017

Tip: For image optimization you can use various tools, for example, the freeware jpegtran for JPG files or PNGOUT for PNG files. If you edit your images with Photoshop, there is a simple solution: on the tab "File" under "Export," simply click on the option "Store for web." In this way, the images are automatically reduced in size.

Check and Optimize Loading Time

Google's PageSpeed Insights tool shows you specifically which factors you should optimize for your mobile and desktop sites. For the mobile analysis, a very short loading time is recommended:

"PageSpeed Insights analyzes sites to determine whether or not they conform with our recommended loading time of less than one second for mobile sites."

Figure 3: Example of a performance level test with PageSpeed Inisghts

Using the PageSpeed Insights tool, site speed evaluation can range from 0 points (poor) and 100 points (very good). Sites that score above 85 count as "high performing." PageSpeed Insights results can change, however, whenever Google updates its rules or methods of analysis. So, it's worth it to stay up-to-date!

How to Find the Slow Sites on Your Domain

The performance report in Ryte's module Website Success can help you analyze server performance and gives starting points for improvement.

You can:

• check which of your website files are already compromised

• receive a general overview of your website's loading times

• see at a glance which files cause your server to react slowly

• quickly analyze your server performance

• check where CSS resources that influence loading time are being stored up

• see all the image URLs that create a slow loading time

For this, simply open the performance report in the module Website Success and click on "loading time."

Figure 4: Overview of the website's loading time

The report shows you in one glance which files are causing your server to react slowly. You can then activate filters by clicking on the diagrams, for example "slow". Next, choose the file type with the highest number.

Figure 5: View with activated filter

Using the server's answer time, you can see where things need to improve. The "time to first byte" also tells you which files your server needs too long to react to with crawler or browser inquiries.

Conclusion

Goodbye slow loading time - thanks to the above-mentioned tips, and with the help of Ryte, you can do away with this slimy monster! By optimizing your site's performance level, you increase your chances of standing out from the massive online competition. So, aim for a low processing time from the get-go! Important factors are the HTML structure of a site as well as the proper use of scripts, images, CSS, and JavaSript, among others. You can find an excellent guide to optimizing loading time here in the Ryte Magazine.

Have You Met the Other Monsters of Website Optimization?

The Internal Linking Monster
The Duplicate Content Monster
The Bad Canonical Tag Monster
The Orphan Page Monster
The 404 Monster
The Thin Content Monster
The Missing ALT Tags Monster
The Redirects Monster
The Hreflang Monster