Background
Since the inception of the internet, the loading speed of websites and apps has gotten faster and faster over time. And the faster we are served content, for many of us, our tolerance for slow internet goes down. Amazon found that slow loading speed directly affects their bottom line, because people don’t want to wait.
Please Load Faster
Picture this, you’re in a car, bus or train, going somewhere, and you’re looking on your phone. You’re trying to load a website, but nothing appears, you click something and nothing happens. And you think to yourself “Am I doing something wrong or is this website broken?”
We used to have to wait many minutes for even a picture to load, this was normal, and we had the patience for it, but not anymore. We get used to the speed in which things load, and expect everything to load equally as fast.
As more public services and access to service have become digital, for some of us it can be more than an inconvenience to have slow internet. This became abundantly clear in the pandemic, when businesses and schools went remote. The access to faster internet can affect how fast you’re able to do your homework, or are able to get work done.
Time Is Money
Several years ago Amazon calculated the price of loading speed, and found that for every 1 second of loading time, they could potentially lose 1,6 billion in sales each year. At risk of sounding alarmist, asking people wait for content to load can literally costs businesses.
Optimizing For Google
Amazon’s sales may not comparative with all online sales, but it shows a value that speaks to why speed can matter. Google also estimated in 2016 that “53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load”.
This is why, when Google’s search engine calculates the ranking of different websites, one of the factors it takes into account, is the speed of a website. In other words; the speed directly affects the SEO score of your website, and the cost of your ads in SEM.
In 2018 Google made a big push for this when it announced how important loading speed would become, to its algorithm, when determining the ads and content for its mobile users. Now when someone Googles from their phone, they are more likely to interact with results that load in less than 3 seconds.
Along with good content, SEO and accessibility, the website loading speed can now be considered one of the most important aspects to rank high and be found by the right audience at the right time.
Simple Fast Loading Designs
This is why one of the most important factors in website optimization is loading speed. It’s an interesting area where in different ways you can make big improvements which can give you the “Bigger bang for your buck”.
One way I try to win on speed, is by the page builder I use. Elementer in its latest version is using flexbox containers, which minimize some of the calculations that have to be done to turn code into a beautiful looking website.
And by limiting the amount of animations and other kinds of movement in web design. While they can help make a page load logically, and add to a website being a pleasant experience, I’ve found that by being conservative with animations I don’t add too much to the total page load and keep pages snappy.
WebP Images
Another thing you can do today from the CMS side of your website, is adjusting the size and format of your images. Many old websites, and some new websites that are being build right now, still serve images as JPG or PNG, while WebP is the new standard.
WebP can sometimes be up to 90% smaller than the older formats. And since Apple added support for WebP in iOS 14, released September 16, 2020, this format can now be loaded on every modern browser and device, following the support in Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
Cashing
On the server side of the website, one way to greatly enhance the speed of your website can come from activating cashing.
This means that instead of having to reload content upon request for every time a request is made, the servers has content pre-loaded, rather than having to request and forward it to the user. In essence improving loading speed by having the content one step closer to the user.
A downside could be that whenever changes are made to a website, it takes longer for the changes to be visible to the users, because these changes have to also be processed on the server side. Making the website less flexible short notice for design and content updates. So you’ll have to weight what’s more important, a quick loading website or a website that’s more response for short notice changes.
Services such as Beebyte, CloudFlare and Kinsta allow for server side cashing.
Resources
Most of my learning so far as been through Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Fast or Slow. Getting helpful tips on how to improve speed, and directly seeing the results on a global scale. Try it out, and see how you can improve the loading speed of your website.
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Google's Core Web Vitals
