It’s no secret that page load time is extremely important for your website. If your site takes too long to load visitors will go elsewhere. But did you know how little time you actually have to grab that user? The chart below outlines the scary truth; if your page takes over five seconds to load you’re losing over 30% of your visitors!

What can you do to increase speed?

There are a number of things you can do to increase the speed of your site. Some are simple, others are more involved and start at the beginning of your website project.

• Hosting – Choosing a reliable hosting company is one of the easiest ways to ensure your site loads quickly. This is why we started Mule Hosting; to make sure that our clients had the best hosting possible. By having our own servers we can make sure that they’re configured correctly and that the sites we build run perfectly.
• Image Compression – It’s important to make sure the images on your site are sized correctly for where they’re going, and that you use the correct image type and that it’s compressed correctly. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress they give you the option of what size photo you want to use. It’s important to choose the size closest to what you want it to display as, and then use the height and width variables on the image to get it to the exact size. If you have a 2,000 pixel wide photo in a 200 pixel wide area, you’re eating up unnecessary bandwidth. Ideally you want to upload the image at the exact size you want it to display at since asking the browser to resize them eats up valuable time.
• Code – This is one of those things you need to make sure is done correctly from the beginning. It’s important to make sure your web developer knows how to optimize a website for load time. Some questions to ask them are: Are you using caching? Are you putting the stylesheets at the top and scripts at the bottom? Are you using gzip? Are all images optimized? This list of questions can go on for a while, but those are the basics.

This is only a fraction of the things you can do to increase the speed of your site, but they’re the easiest to do and can have the most impact.

If you want to see how your site rates you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This tool will rank your site out of 100 points, and let you know what you can do to speed up your site.

Check out our other posts about analytics.