Learn how to improve your website speed for better performance

With the extreme rise in the use and popularity of mobile devices; you would be doing yourself a huge disservice if your website is not designed to respond and adjust to mobile and other devices.

The ultimate goal of responsive web design is to avoid the unnecessary resizing, scrolling, zooming, or panning that occurs with websites that are not compatible with different devices. It is often very difficult to navigate these websites, and it may even cost you potential customers who become frustrated with trying to figure out how to do something.

It is very important to have a fast website in order to enhance the user experience. When a user accesses a slow website, he tends to quickly move away from it.

The speed of your site affects every metric you care about:

- Bounce rate.

- Search ranking.

- Conversion rate.

- Page views.

- Reader satisfaction.

- Even revenue.

According to crazyegg.com survey, a one-second delay in page load time yields:

- 11% fewer page views.

- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

-  7% loss in conversions.

Another way is to use the following guidelines:

- Below 1 second = perfect

- 1-3 seconds = above average

- 3-7 seconds = average

- 7+ seconds = very poor

These benchmarks are based on studies showing that 47% of people expect a web page to load in under two seconds, and 57% of visitors will abandon a page that takes 3 or more seconds to load.

Some factors that affect website speed:

- Third-party online ad network like online advertisements.

- Poor choice of web host

- Too many widgets and plugins requires more work for it to load.

- Not using Gzip compression will take more time to load web pages and use more bandwidth.

- External embedded media like videos, music and image slideshows will add more codes to the web page, affecting page load speed.

- Unsuitable browsers and apps like Flash which is notorious for slowing down a website and it’s not even compatible with most mobile devices.

- Large image file sizes can slow down the site when these images are loaded on browsers.

- Not implementing expire headers would be difficult for the visitors’ browsers to cache the content locally.

No one has the time to wait for a web page that takes forever to load, especially when one can easily go to a competitor’s website. Optimize your website speed for better performance.