The page load time of a website is critical in terms of customer acquisition. As per reports by Google, if it takes more than 3 seconds to load your website, more than half of your visitors will abandon it. It eventually results in conversion and profit. There are online tools available to check your website’s loading time and performance. As you are paying for it, this may be a bigger deal than you think. Page speed is one of the signals used to rank pages as per Google. Longer load times will also have an impact on your ranking in search engines and your exposure to people looking for your company’s products and services. You want people to see what you’ve posted online, whether, a blogger, you’re a business owner or something in between. This is less likely to occur if your website is loading slowly. There are multiple factors that affect the loading speed of a web page-

• Web Hosting

The hosting company, as well as the choice of server where your website is stored, has a significant impact on the loading speed of page. Both your visitors and your business are likely to suffer if you make the wrong decision. Always select a host and a plan that are appropriate for your website’s requirements. You should keep few things in mind while making decisions about web hosting-

1. Server Response Time – Choose independent data on Time to First Byte (TTFB), which is the measure of how long it takes for the server to respond to a request.
2. Equipment – Solid State Drives (SSDs) are comparatively faster than mechanical drives.
3. Accounts Per Server – an overcrowded server can reduce performance.

• Heavy CSS and Javascripts

CSS and JavaScript files add on functionality and make your website look more appealing but are also common reasons for sluggishness. This becomes a huge problem when it occurs with above-the-fold content. Relocating the tracking code and scripting below the fold is the best solution. This will prevent Google PageSpeed Insights from slowing down your site with First Content Paint (FCP) or First Meaningful Paint (FMP).

• Not up to the mark Coding

There are website developers who are not efficient and create websites with massive blocks of code that only serve minor functions. As a result, websites are poorly coded and load slowly. You will most likely notice a speed increase in your website if you remove unnecessary elements from your code such as extra spaces, line breaks, and other formatting data that are not required to do the job. There are numerous tools available to help you improve your code. Hire an experienced coder and make sure your page is well codded.

• Extra Widgets and Plugins

Using plugins and widgets can add features and make your page looks more appealing to the audience. To begin, ensure that you are only using those that you truly require. Secondly use resources from trusted sources rather than settling for cheap add ons because they can negatively affect a page’s loading speed.   

• Hotlinking

When you use hotlinking, you are displaying images on your website that are hosted on a different server. Someone, for example, might use the URL of one of your images to display that image on their website. If this occurs, your server resources are being used to benefit someone else’s site. The site that links to your images may send several hundred to several hundred thousand queries to your server. This will obviously slow down your server and may result in the suspension of your hosting account. Hotlinking can be avoided by adding some code to your.htaccess file.

• Absence of CDN

The use of a CDN will improve the performance of the website. Its absence will have an effect on load time. A content delivery/distribution network (CDN) is a network that delivers and distributes content. It is a global network of proxy servers and data centers that work together to improve the performance and availability of services for end-users.

These are the factors that affect loading speed adversely of your web page. There are multiple ways through which you can optimise loading speed of your webpage which eventually help in conversion and enhanced user experience.

• Optimise you webpage speed

 Images improve the appearance of your web pages and the quality of your content. Large images, on the other hand, can cause loading times to be delayed.As a result, one of the simplest ways to improve page loading times is to compress and optimise your images. This can include switching file formats, enabling lazy loading, and compressing images with lossy or lossless compression.

• Caching Web Pages

Caching web pages is the most sought after way of speeding up your web pages. Cache save copies of site’s files reducing the total work that is required for server to generate and serve web pages. By requiring the server to use fewer resources to load a page, caching your web pages can help reduce Time to First Byte (TTFB).

• Content Delivery Network

This can improve performance by shortening the distance that data requests must travel between browsers and your host’s servers. A CDN reduces network latency and produces lower TTFBs by loading content for a web page from a server close to each visitor.

• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

Page loading speed can be improved by optimising the way your files load. Similarly, minifying your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code can help. This entails removing unnecessary spaces, characters, comments, and other elements to reduce file size.Reducing the size of your files also makes them easier to combine. As a result, the code is cleaner, and the web pages are leaner and load faster.

Ignoring web page metrics can make all your hardwork go in vain. If you are looking to provide best quality experience to your audience, then web page is a very crucial factor. You should make constant efforts and keep a regular check to make the page as fast as possible.  These suggestions are general, but they can help your site speed whether you are a boat dealer or a restaurant, so you should find them useful.