Quick & Easy Improvements For Your Page Load Speed

There are a number of reasons to ensure that your website is loading quickly. One of them is page abandonment. When your page takes a long time to load most customers will leave before having a chance to see your services.

A recent study from Google has shown that more than half of mobile site visitors will leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, so making sure your site loads quickly should always be a priority.

The load speed of your pages is a factor when it comes to ranking in desktop searches, and as of July 2018 it will be a factor in mobile searches too. There are a number of common mistakes that can potentially slow the load speed of your site, but luckily most of these are easily fixed.

Here are a few of the most common mistakes that can have negative effects on your page load speed, and how you can easily fix them.

The Size Of Your Image Files

Large image file sizes are one of the most common mistakes people make that can slow your page load speed.

A lot of people aren’t aware of how important image optimization is, which can result in large image files being used where an image of reduced size would have provided identical results.

In order to avoid having these unnecessarily large files slowing down your site, you should resize your images to the actual size they will be displayed at. You can also find image compression tools online that will help you to lower your file sizes, but look for tools that will show you a preview of what the image will look like post-compression before you compress your images in order to avoid sacrificing image quality.

Loading Files From A Third Party Website

It is best to avoid loading items from third party sites whenever possible. Since you have no control over how fast assets from a third party site will load, if they are loading too slowly it could have a negative effect on your own rankings. That is why you should only use third party files when there is no other option. If you are using scripts or styles from an external source, (such as bootstrap) it is always best to download the files you are going to be using and link to them locally in your header and footer files.

Unused Scripts on Your Site

A lot of websites will use header and footer files to display the top menu, header and footer of the site, as these sections are often more or less the same on every page of the site. So it can be coded once and then used again on as many pages as necessary.

This can save you a lot of time when it comes to making updates to your navigation or to the elements in your website’s footer, as once you have updated the header and footer files, the updates will be applied to every page of the website. An with this can arise with some scripts. While there are elements of JavaScript that you should have on all pages of your website (such as the Google Analytics scripts), there are s lot of other JavaScript elements that might only be necessary on certain pages.

Look at the scripts you have included in your header and footer files. Anything that is not needed on every page should be moved to the body of the relevant pages so that your scripts are only loaded on the pages that are actually using them.

Conclusion

After you fix these common mistakes, your load speed should be significantly quicker, you will hopefully see a positive change in your search engine rankings and your mobile site will be ready for July 2018 when load speed becomes a factor in mobile search rankings.