HOW TO GET YOUR WEBSITE TO LOAD FASTER

WEB TECHNOLOGY POST by Gene Vann
INTERNET MARKETING (SEO) TECHNOLOGY BLOG
PAGE LOAD TIME: Is an important part of SEO.

August 21, 2015 | Marketing post | Increasing Page Load Speed

DON'T SETTLE FOR A SLOW LOADING WEBSITE
WEB MARKETING TECHNOLOGY POST DESIGNED TO HELP YOU WITH CONVERSIONS

Can you imagine spending thousands of dollars and thousands of hours optimizing your website to increase visitors only to have them leave before ever actually seeing your site? Page load speed is very important to your SEO efforts. But it's not a tough egg to crack. Many times I've seen websites and blogs that are big money makers loading so slow that I just have to bounce sooner than I wanted to. I can't name them, I don't think that would be nice. 

These are sites and blog sites, mostly blog sites that earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. Some of them I dare say, are indeed generating one even two million dollars a month. Maybe some bloggers have reached the pentacle of their dreams and now rest o on their laurels, I don't know. But I do know is that slow loading websites throw my web experience off and I don't care if the site is popular, if it takes too long to load I'm gone. And I think that's just human nature.  

You find lots of advice about what to do about a slow loading website. The reason I'm writing about this is because most of us don't want to risk loosing a visitor, particularly due to an unresponsive website. I'm writing about it from the perspective of "CONVERSIONS" We're in the business of building up the traffic to our websites, not discouraging or losing traffic and visitors. Not if we can do something about it. 

I might also add that Google does penalize websites that are slow loading. The general rule is your site should load within five seconds, ten at the most. You can test your site's loading speed at Google's site speed tester. It will test your sites loading speed and give you some insights about what's wrong or what could be happening. 

Navigation time between pages increases with a slow loading website. And the more visitors you have on a site at any given time will require it to use more bandwidth which in turn can slow the site down even more. Have you ever been scooping up exciting information on a website and had to navigate to another page to continue with the information only to fine that the page wouldn't load? You end up having to bounce back to the page you were already on, because that next page just wouldn't load? You try it again but it's still slow maybe even slower now. 

Visitors rarely ever return to a site that does the slow loading thing. Even when the site has the perfect information they need, they'd rather try and find that same information somewhere else before heading back to the slow loading site. I personally have had to bounce from sites that were really hitting the nail on the head providing a juggernaut of info, either that or the site was just a fun site be on. It's frustrating because it's like throwing me out and back to the search engine to look for the information when I just had it right there. A slow loading website can be very frustrating.

  

Many of your site visitors will leave your site if they experience long load times. It's like they put you on hold all of sudden, like throwing off your data gathering rhythm or something. Your site should take only a few seconds to load the next page. Well today lets talk about that and how to fix it. I'm going to share a couple of need to know things first, not much just a couple of things. Then straight on to some solutions. Lets start with site size. 

Of course if you've created a huge website filled with text, pictures, videos, gadgets, moving banners and other things, you'll end up with a slow loading website no matter what else you do to speed it up. Sites are like anything else, you can over do them. Word Press sites for example are data hungry energy munching websites and it doesn't take much to design them right into a crashing mode. So you should check to see if there are plugins available that might help you with slow loading and crashing. But keep plugins to a minimum, they too in excess will slow your page load time. Reducing the number re-directs on your site will help to decrease load time. Also steer clear of "FLASH", its pretty much out now, but still around in places. 

Another quick tip I can give you is sometimes visitors can be running programs or have programs running in the background on their computer that slow website loading too. One visitor told me my site loads real slow. But her system was old and overrun with programs, actually all websites load slow on her computer. One example is their virus protection. I use Norton and McAfee, but Norton at times will confiscate my computer ignoring any command that interferes with whatever it's doing at that moment. If a visitor isn't aware of this about their Norton sometimes your site might just have to bear the blame.  

Norton is heavy, and a hungry selfish program. That shouldn't stop anyone from using it though, it's just good to know. So how do we fix a slow loading website built within the average website size of  320Kb? 

Another thing some operators should have to lookout for are videos and images. It is easy to exceed your page load time with just videos and JavaScript. So lookout for that too. My first suggestion is to cut back on javascript (per page) on the site. I think the magic number is 6, no more than. Do the same with CSS, particularly above the fold on a page. The fold is the top portion of a page generally preceding the body or content, about the top quarter of the page. You can compress your images to make them load faster,here"s a tool and there are other tools around the net you can use. Also "Sprites" or CSS image grouping can be used for sites highly dependent upon images.  

A CSS file requests can significantly slow a browser down because it has to go fetch, load, parse and execute all the CSS files in the  <head> before it can begin to render your website. And don't let here be JavaScript and CSS in the <head>. You can get around this and speed your site's loading time up anyway by identifying your critical CSS files found in the <Head> of the page and keeping them in the head while taking any other CSS code out and placing it inline with your HTML code after the opening <body> tag. You're basically just moving the non critical CSS files down to the body in the background of the page. keep them between the style tags but within or "inline" with the HTML code found after the open >body> tag. Otherwise your browser has to download all those CSS references and your site visitor has to sit and wait while it does that. Your CSS extraction code would look something like this. 
 
<!doctype html> 
<head> 
 <style> /* inlined critical CSS */ </style> 
 <script> loadCSS('non-critical.css'); </script> 
</head>
 <body> ...body goes here 
</body> 
</html>

Since this blog is not about coding I'll stop there on the re-coding aspect of your page. I just wanted you to know about that alternative and give you a little peak at what it might look like. The process is a lot more entailing than this brief mention of it. Unless you know HTML and CSS I suggest you call your webmaster about the CSS extraction and relocation processes. If your webmaster is not familiar with the process have him/her visit this site for the complete steps. Again let me warn you not to experiment with the coding layout of your website or any of it's pages unless you really know what you're doing. 

Also keep in mind you don't have to keep the same layout/design on slow loading pages. You can simply take some things out or off the page to speed your page load time up. Look for pages with several video players on a single page. Try reducing the number of players on a slow loading page. If your site is on shared hosting you can put in a work ticket and have your host take a look at it too. It won't cost you any thing. Sometimes a hosting server that doesn't use caching can be the cause of a slow loading website. Of course if your site is on a dedicated server or on VPS hosting you'll need to fix problems of that nature through your webmaster or do it yourself. If your site slows down just after something new was added to it then you already know what's causing it to load slowly. So  #1. Don't lose sleep over your site loading too slow, it can be fixed relatively quick and easy.  #2. Take it seriously.  #3. Find out what's causing it.  #4. Do something about it. 

I hope you're having a great day.  See you at the next SEO How-To blog
Best Regards,
Gene  

+GeneVannmilton/about/p/pub