How Page Loading Speeds Affect Website Performance

For most of you who have not heard about the new element of page ranking that has been introduced by Google, well here it is: Page Speed! That’s right, page loading speed has been made a ranking factor, so if your website loads slowly, it about time you get it updated. How? Read on!

There are numerous ways via which you could reduce the time that a page takes to load up completely. First and foremost, the most important element that page speed depends on is the hosting company. If the hosting company has a lousy infrastructure, rest assured your page will take a longer time to load. Ensuring that the host server has features such as high amount of RAM and solid state hard drives will improve not just the speed of the server, but also the speed of data transmission and this is especially important for sites that are built using Word press.

Apart from that, it would also be wise to have your site hosted at a physical location that is nearest to your targeted audience, in other words distance does matter! In the even that your website is large (lots of pages, information, images and linked to a lot of server side code, shared hosting may not be the best approach as establishing sites such as these on Virtual Private Servers (VPS) would provide greater results by far. However, if your site attracts a huge amount of traffic (which would strain ‘random access memory’ capacity) choosing a hosting company with a managed dedicated server would definitely be the option.

Other things that you could do to spice up the speed of your page is to optimise all images, this can be done using a variety of tools that are available online such as tinypng.com which could also be found as a plugin for Word press. Page caching, on static websites is another trick that you could ask your web developer and / or hosting company to implement this. Minifying CSS and JavaScript which revolves around stripping all white space from both CSS and JS is another method which will reduce load time and even for this there are online tools that are able to do this for static websites (a good example is cssminifier.com).

However, be warned that minifying would render the site ‘un-editable’ and thus it is important to retain a secondary copy of the file in regular CSS and JS ( W3 Total Cache is a tool that does not only minify, but also retains a developer’s copy). Other hacks to reduce website load speed includes minimising the use of off-site scripts and linking scripts that are held by third parties (this includes scripts that are kept in Google repositories such as J-Query and Google Fonts) which has the potential to impact site speed quite significantly and hence it is more viable to host everything on your local server.

Third party JavaScript additions are another factor known to lower your load time and as such even this should be minimised as the use of scripts to gather data from a third party server will naturally create ‘relays’ which is the most common factor that reduces site speed performance on Google’s page speed insights test which will in turn impact your Google Ranking. If you feel that this cannot be avoided (e.g. using Google Analytics for tracking data) you could opt to collect data via software you install onto your web hosting account, however analytics is definitely the better option for data insights by any standards.

Heads up people, speed is the new king on Google’s ranking criterion, take action before you find yourself at the bottom of the pile!