Summary
We've spoken before about how slow page load speed is a negative thing. So, not only is it negative for your users who are on your site and trying to navigate to a page and it takes forever to load, but also Google looking to provide the best search results experience to their users. Google will be hesitant to rank your page, your website highly, if its pages are loading slowly and providing the users poor experience. So we know Why it's important for pages to load quickly, but what causes pages to load slowly? And can you fix it? Let's dive a bit deeper.
Transcript:
We’ve spoken before about how slow page load speed is a negative thing. So, not only is it negative for your users who are on your site and trying to navigate to a page and it takes forever to load, but also Google looking to provide the best search results experience to their users. Google will be hesitant to rank your page, your website highly, if its pages are loading slowly and providing the users poor experience. So we know Why it’s important for pages to load quickly, but what causes pages to load slowly?
The easiest way to optimize your website for faster page load speed is to optimize the heavy content that’s on your website. So have you content, examples might be big images, not only big on the screen but but big in terms of file size. And generally within your content management system, you can see the file size of a particular image and then optimize that (smoosh it, if you will) to compress the load speed while still looking good on the front end.
Another example of heavy content would be video. So the longer the video, generally the larger, the file size a longer, it’s going to take to load that display that on your site. So there are easy ways to compress images and video. Image compression can happen, generally it best if you do that when you’re creating the image, saving that out as an image as JPEG or PNG with a compression ratio that’s going to give you the optimal look for the minimal file size.
Video is just tough. You can compress video to a degree, but the better way to go about that is to host it on a third party, like a YouTube or Vimeo, that will help your page load quickly, and it will control the load speed of the video itself behind content on the front end. There are some things you can do on the back end to optimize your page for faster load speed.
These are some of the things that we do as a web development company. Some quick examples: pushing some of the code that is heavier to load such a JavaScript toward the bottom of the page, not the bottom of when somebody’s looking at the page, but the order in which the page loads content. You can push the JavaScript or heavy code to the bottom of the page so that the page loads in the code that is slower to load. Is when it’s a low load as the after the Paige finishes loading on the front act.
A great way to check your page load speed and what is causing that page load speed to be slower than it could be, is GTmetrix.com, you’re going to see a link here on the screen and you can check that, run a free assessment on your site and see what things are causing your pages to load more slowly.
If you need any help at all, optimizing your website faster, we can help. I’m Rob Riggs, with Code Conspirators. I look forward to hearing from you.
