Website Speed and Performance

Website Speed and Performance are key elements for the success of your online presence. The time for which your website loads and it’s behaviour are essential factors that should be considered when building it and constantly monitored afterwards. It affects User Experience, SEO, and your overall digital strategy. For example, if you pay for advertising in Google or Facebook and your website takes too long to load or doesn’t load at all, which leads to visitors leaving your website too quick, you just waste your money.

The factors that affect website speed are numerous some of which are even external and not under your control (such as user’s Internet speed). However, you can do a lot to optimize most of them. Starting from choosing a reliable hosting provider for your website. Implementing good caching solutions. Optimizing the images in your website. Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network). Optimizing the scripts in your website (CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and more), building a good website structure, or choosing a lightweight theme if using a CMS (Content Management System, for example WordPress). And more!

User Experience: When your website loads faster you will provide a better user experience and increase your chance to engage more with your visitors.

Search Engines: One of the factors that search engines consider when listing search results is website speed.

Lower Bounce Rate: If it takes too long to open certain page it is highly likely that visitors will leave your website before they even interacted with it.

GTmetrix – tests website performance and speed from different locations and gives a detailed report with a lot of suggestions for optimisation.

Pingdom – tests website speed from different locations and gives report and suggestions from improvements.

UPTRENDS – tests website speed from different locations and on different browsers, screens, and devices. Moreover, it gives a detailed report about the loading time of different components on a page.

Google PageSpeed Insights – tests website speed and performance of both Mobile and Desktop version. Gives a detailed report and suggestions for optimisations. It also shows the time it takes to load different phases of the website.

Lighthouse in Google Chrome DevTools – Very useful tool to audit your website’s performance on Mobile and Desktop version. You can find it when you click the right button of your mouse in the Google Chrome browser and select ‘Inspect Element’. After that select the ‘Audits’ tab as indicated below.