Page Speed and why it Matters
With internet speeds way past to dial up speeds of the early internet, why does speed matter? If it only takes a user seconds to download mb’s of data then why so much fuss. I remember when I was a teenager and it took sometimes hours to download a single MP3 file. Nowadays you can download a whole album in a few seconds. If internet is so much faster then what is the point? Well in today’s internet users find your website on a wide variety of devices and connection speeds. Having a website up and running is just not enough to make it in our ever evolving world where anything you want to learn about is only a few key strokes away. With so much competition in the web space, if your website takes a lot of time to load, the user will surly lose interest and move on to the next website.
Page Ranking
Website are now being ranked in Google according to page speed. This alone is reason enough for any website owner that would like to increase their traffic. All the websites I develop for my clients are fully page speed optimized to not only help increase page rank, but user experience. Having visitors waiting long for content to be loaded on their device is not a good experience.
What do I need to do?
The first step is to see what area needs improved and why. There are two tools that I use to check for page speed. Google has their own page speed tester that is extremely helpful to web developers that shows you exactly where you are lacking and how to improve. GT Metrix is another one that is more in depth and shows you examples of how to improve specific areas.
How long does it take?
Optimizing your website really doesn’t take all the much time or effort depending on how much and what type of content you have on your website. My home page is a one page website with large images so mine took a little longer to score high in page speed scores. With just a few htaccess tweaks and compressed images, the speed improved dramatically. Page caching is the most important part that will help you out the most with the least amount of effort.