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How Page Load Speeds Affect Your Website

04 February 2016 09:28

We all know the frustration of waiting even a few seconds for a website to load. However, did you know that search engines measure your page load time to the millisecond?
 
For this reason, here at iPages we are extremely sensitive to how long websites take to load and make every effort to reduce the page load speed on our websites. Whilst we know that this is not going to be noticed by the majority of your website users, faster load times have additional benefits including aiding search engine optimisation.

Why is Page Load speed important?

1. User Experience: The main affect of how long your website takes to load will be felt by your users. With just 5 seconds to engage your customer (and only 3 seconds for mobile customers!) a slow load speed can lead to lost sales and dissatisfied visitors (GlobalDots).

2. Search Engine Optimisation: Search Engines, like web browsers, want their users to be directed to quality websites where they will have a good experience. Hence, search engines such as Google will also favour websites with faster load times.

How can you find your Page Load speed?

There are a number of tools to find out your page load speed and we would recommend the Google Developer Tool. This gives you a breakdown of your page load speed for mobile and desktop and lists out potential sources for improvement.

For websites which are not mobile friendly, this tool will also highlight the usability issues for mobile users.

How to decrease your Page Load speed?

Whilst online tools will give you an indication of how to decrease your Page Load speed, many of the actions given are out of the control of normal website owners. Therefore, at iPages the development team make every effort to tackle Google's criteria to give our website users the best experience possible. These include optimising how our servers store images, compressing files and reducing CSS/Javascript.

However, there are simple actions that every website owner can take including only uploading the maximum image size required for your website. Whilst we do our best to optimise your images for every view of your website, it helps to have appropriately sized images to start with. For more information about how to size your images correctly, see our blog 'Does Size Matter For Google?'

Can we help?

If you would like more information about how we help our website users behind the scenes, or if you'd just like to chat about your current website, simply get in touch.