One of the most frustrating things that online users encounter when surfing the web is the amount of time it takes a particular page to load. Here we look at some of the ways you can test and increase page load speed in order to lower your bounce rate.
You may think web page lags are largely a thing of the past. Remember when everyone had dial-up internet service? At those slow speeds it was nearly impossible to stream a video and website designers were advised to keep things simple so that visitors didn’t leave quickly in frustration over the lengthy waiting period. These bounces did nothing to help an e-commerce business.
How To Test Page Load Speed
Surprisingly, this can still be an issue today. Even with broadband speed, there are some factors that adversely affect the loading speed of your web pages. Not surprisingly, these include very large graphics and a large number of advertisements. Very involved CSS style sheets and Flash animation could be the culprits as well.
If you are not sure how fast your pages load, ask a friend or relative to access them from their home computer and jot down the page load time. Since your browser’s cache already has the necessary files, you cannot properly determine your page load speed. It is a good idea to have several people perform this experiment from a variety of different computers, operating systems, and browsers.
Alternatively, there are many online tools you can use to test page load time, such as Pingdom Tools.
How To Increase Page Load Speed
Getting around these issues involves reducing the amount of HTTP requests that occur when your webpage is accessed. When a visitor opens the page for the first time, their browser will spend a good deal of the time, approximately 80% of it, accessing the various scripts, images, and stylesheets associated with it. Their browser’s cache is empty because they have never visited the URL before. Subsequent visits will result in the page loading much more quickly, but you have already frustrated the user and lost a potential client by this time.
To help increase page load speed, combine all the scripts into a single file. With CSS, use one stylesheet. CSS Sprites helps you create a background that takes multiple images and turns them into a single background. The same thing can be done with other images utilising an image map.
A way to make pages appear to load faster is to transfer the stylesheet into the Head file. This allows a progressive loading of the elements on the page. Conversely, move javascripts to the bottom of the page since they hinder parallel downloads.
Files can also be compressed using Gzip. Compressed files allow a faster response to HTTP requests.
Limit the number of ads appearing on your website to only those that are most relevant and those that make money. Too many advertisements make your site look spammy as well as hindering page load time.
Minimize redirects, such as 301 and 302 responses. These take up unnecessary time by inserting go-between code and the pages are not cached so they must be uploaded every time the page is accessed.
While there are many more very technical methods you can use to increase page load speed that are beyond the scope of this article, the takeaway here is that slow websites lose customers. In this day of instant gratification, few things are more unhelpful than a site that takes forever to access. Reduce the amount of advertisements and merge style elements to make the pages load faster.
About Sean Rasmussen
The first thing I did was get rid of the TweetMeme plugin. Facebook Connect is another piece of junk that is horribly slow. Disqus for comments, more of the same.
But it’s not about a single post page, that’s of little issue. It’s when you go to the domain and you have 10 posts showing a TweetMeme, everyone has to render on it’s own and most blogs have 10 posts on the domain.
The solution is to get the code for each gadget and only display them on the single page, never on the domain. In WordPress that means it’s the single.php file. Don’t use plugins, this is where the problem begins at.
When you add the sharing gadgets, JavaScript or however the button is displayed only on the single page you increase the domain speed and that is what is really important, the domain. At least that’s how I am dealing with this issue first.
Agree with many of your points Chris, however for many ‘first-timers’ on the web build a blog and use the vast array of themes and plugins which provide them what they want easily and without the need for custom coding. I would also personally not want a slight increase in speed at the expense of reader interaction.
Your correct about Facebook apps, especially networked blogs – that’s a killer, however I have kept it to be more social with my readers. Simple things like only displaying social bookmarking buttons on single pages will increase page speed and this was one of the first things that I implemented.
Thanks for the extra points Chris and Cemil for helping to increase the page load speed. I am one of those ‘first timers’ and are looking to link blogs with applications etc.
I did not about hi-res graphics and Flash animations that slow things down but not not thought about considering the likes of Facebook and Twitter. I have bookmarked this page too.
Some food for thought there Chris, thanks for your input mate.
Interesting you should say that because when I did a speed test on my blog it showed that two of the plugins took considerably longer to load than everything else!
Slow loading pages definitely turn me off.
But what do you do if you are not a technical expert and still want a fast loading page? I case keeping the page “simple” is one possibility. I don’t know enough about CSS or Java (yet) to know what to do with it, but I know where I can ask
Keeping your pages simple is one way to avoid slow loading pages for sure Renee. There is also a lot of technical stuff you can do… which in my opinion is best left to specialists in the trade if you want to go that far.
I won’t wait long and if a page does not load quickly I am gone, I try to keep my pages as simple as possible, and hopefully they load quickly for others, didn’t think that they may not load as fast on other computers, now I will have to go check that.
Thanks For the advice
Hi Sean,
I think I read somewhere recently that page load speed was now a factor that Google takes into account for your ranking. So, given that; is this something that we need to take seriously?
Then again, I’m just a beginner so my sites are fairly basic. I’m guessing that testing your page load speed is more of a factor when you’re building flashier and more complex sites. Or, do I have that wrong?
Hi Jazz,
From what I have heard, site speed is now a ranking factor in the Google algorithm. How much of a ranking factor, I am not sure on. Unless you have a very complex site with loads of ads, widgets, flash etc, I wouldn’t be overly concerned for now. I would be more concerned about visitors to my site, if my page loads very slowly, there is a good chance they will leave before it loads.
Just another thing we need to get right to get our sites ranked on google. I suppose with the increased competition google has to come up with new ways to make it a little harder for us.
This is something I haven’t put any thought into. My page load speed would be important because I know myself I don’t hang around waiting for websites to load. In todays world, when you look something up, if it hasn’t appeared within milliseconds you become impatient. Thanks for making me aware of this.
Great post Sean,
Thanks so much for the useful tips & resources here, I just used the Pingdom tools you have posted to check my website & it came back 5.5 seconds… is that good or bad?
Slow loading pages are such a drag so if I can speed up my page loading time it will definitely be an advantage!
Hi Sean
The page loading speed had never occurred to me as a problem until I read this article and now I understand.
I too will click off a site if it is taking too long to load so I realise when I finish building my blog,
I will need to test that function andget some friends to test it too..
I will also book mark this article as a reminder about what will slow the loading time. If there are problems other than what I can do with this information I would call in an IT person.
Page load speed is one of my bug bears not so much for my blog but when I am visiting other pages.
When I logged onto this site I was frustrated because it was taking so long and surprised because of whom it belongs to. Maybe it has to do with the browser I am using to get here.
I’ve added some Amazon widgets to my site recently and have been surprised at how the load time of my page has increased – significantly!
I don’t like slow pages – they are a pain!
Is there anyway to get a page to load from the top down – sometimes it is quite random of waht loads first to last!
could you please increase my page speed
Light web page definitely decrease your bounce rate css sprite is important as well putting java scripts in external file can help to reduce page loading time nice post dude thanks for sharing.
To see if your site supports GZip you can use GzipDetect online tool:
http://www.sysadmin.md:3000/