by Mohammad Hasan

Ever wondered what can happen in a single second?

• Lightning will strike the ground 100 times
• A bee will flap its wings over 270 times
• Your body will go through 100,000 chemical reactions
• Jeff Bezos will make $2,489

If you are a business owner, you’re probably wondering why should any of this bother you? Bezos’s Pay might feed you a humble pie, but all the other facts are just letters, jumbled and formed together to make sentences; for you, the only relevant one second statistics is – how a one-second delay in webpage loading time leads to:

• 11% fewer page views
• 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
• 7% loss in conversions

So, in short, slow speeds kills conversions. In fact, according to some studies, 47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less — and 40% will leave a page if this doesn’t happen. This means that if your site takes more than three seconds to load, you lose almost half of your visitors even before they arrive on your site.

Suppose you are ranking #1 for a keyword, but due to the slow loading speed of your website, your visitors abandon your page halfway through. This makes Google think, ‘Hey! The #1 result isn’t making our users happy. Let’s drop it down a few spots.’

Also, increasing your site’s speed can result in the Googlebot crawling more of your site’s URLs. In other words: slow-loading pages eat up valuable Googlebot time. So, the faster the load time, the more of the pages a crawler will be able to visit before they run out of time.

So, yes, today in this blog post, we will tackle the most crucial factor of every Technical SEO Analysis: Website speed.

Now, first thing first, I hope none of you are confusing page speed with website speed. These two are sometimes used interchangeably in casual conversations, but technically speaking they’re not the same.

Website Speed

“Website speed,” is the page speed for several page views on a website. Whereas, Page speed can be described in either “page load time” or “Time to First Byte.” Wow, too much jargon so early into the blog post, wait, wait, don’t get overwhelmed let’s try to understand what these terms mean.

• Fully Loaded Page: 

  The fully loaded page is basically how long it takes for all of the resources/elements on a page to load. This is the time it takes to load all 100% of the content on your page.

• Time to First Byte: 

  This term measures how long it takes for a page to start the loading process. If you’ve ever clicked on a page and then blankly stared at a white screen for a few seconds, then you’re witnessing Time to First Byte in action.

• First Meaningful Paint/First Contextual Paint: 

  This is another metric that calculates the page loading time. First meaningful paint can be defined as the time it takes to load at least some meaningful content that can be read by the user.

You’re probably wondering which metric is the most preferred? Well, there’s no metric which is considered the leader; in fact, all of these parameters have some fault of their own. Instead, the correct strategy is to focus on improving your page loading speed for ALL of the metrics that you find.

Now, as you may all know Google has used page speed as a ranking factor since 2010, and according to numerous sources and reports, the best industry practices which can improve your site speed and consequently help your rakings are given below; so let’s get cooking:

• Compress Images:

Images being a critical part of a company’s multimedia strategy, take up 50-90% of a page’s size. Make certain that your pictures are no bigger than they should be, that they are in the correct format (PNGs are considered better for graphics featuring less than 16 colours while JPEGs are better for photos).

Make sure that these pictures are compressed.

Use CSS sprites to make a format for pictures that you often use on your sites like buttons and icons. CSS sprites join your pictures into one enormous picture that loads all at once (which implies fewer HTTP solicitations) and afterward shows just the segments that you want to show. This implies you save precious load time by not making the users wait for the various images to load.

• Clean that code:

In other words, reduce the resources found on your page.

This includes:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• And any other code found on your page

The first step in your clean up drive should be to get rid of any bloated code which appears on your webpage. This other code could be from features that you don’t have on your site anymore. Or a gift from your tired and resentful developer.

Either way, before cleaning up your act, go and clean your code.

• Activate Browser Caching

This allows the users to store parts of your webpage in their browser cache; this makes the loading time very fast as it leads to skipping a lot of steps.

• Implement a CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is one of the fastest ways to boost your site’s loading speed. CDNs first try to figure out where the physical location of your visitor is, then, they serve the requested site resources to them from a server closest to their actual location.

For example: If you are located in the UK and trying to access Patanjali’s site information, CDN, to reduce the loading time will serve you the required information from a server located in the UK.

Fleapo, among the best web development company, follows through each item in this checklist and brings you with the best website user experience.

As Ziad K. Abdelnour would say, “Work smart, stay informed, never give up, and great things will happen.”

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