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Website design agency in London (UK): What is loading speed and why it matters in 2022?

The first thing that can make potential customers go to competitors' websites is a slow website loading. Even a modern interface and good content will not help save the situation, because nowadays the user simply doesn't want to wait! In addition site owners must understand that search engines take page speed into account when ranking, especially when it comes to commercial queries.

Our website agency will help you figure out why website loading speed is so important and what tools are used to check it.

What is website loading speed?

Site speed measures the amount of time it takes for a user to see and interact with the site's content. It allows you to determine what elements of the site need to be improved. One second of website loading is great, two or three seconds is good, up to five seconds is normal, but more than that  is bad. A delay of just a couple of seconds reduces page conversions by 37%. Let's figure out what affects the website page speed.

There are several reasons can cause the delay:

  • Large pages.

The weight of HTML pages can change the website loading speed, so it is worth using a data compression algorithm. The Gzip compression method may be suitable for this purpose.

  • Illustrations, banners, pictures in high resolution.

To solve the problem, you may need to compress images, convert files, or remove unnecessary elements.

  • Overloaded site code.

Large CSS code, JavaScript, and comments, spaces. Cleaning the code using special services, shortening the names of functions will help.

  • A large number of requests from the browser.

The more elements there are on the page, the lower the site speed in Google. You can cache data, merge items, and delete unnecessary files.

  • Wrong hosting.

The website should be hosted on the account with the right requirements.

  • Videos on the site that are published via FTP.

You need to post them on a special platform, for example, Vimeo or Youtube.

Up to 80% of potential customers may not return to the website if the site speed was low on their first visit. Site page speed is an important ranking factor, especially for mobile search results.

In addition, site speed affects the following metrics:

  • conversion of an online project;
  • the depth of user views and the bounce rate;
  • brand reputation;
  • behavioural factors.

Letting your competitors win the rankings and conversion races can result in lost profits and leads. According to Google research, users will react even to a delay of up to a second, and waiting times longer than 5 seconds can cause them to navigate to another page. Mobile users can wait up to eight seconds.

Inspection tools

  • Google Pagespeed Insights is a well-known SEO tool that measures loading speed and gives recommendations on how to best reduce it. It uses Lighthouse technology and user observation data.
  • Pingdom Website Speed ​​Test - allows you to check the website loading speed and choose one of seven possible locations: London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Washington, Sydney, San Francisco, Sao Paulo. In addition to speed, the test displays the indicators of different components of the page.
  • WebPageTest is open source. To start the test, you need to enter the URL, select the appropriate test of the site load speed, browser, type of connection.

Each service has its own settings and allows you to generate a report.

How to improve your website loading speed?

You can increase speed by simplifying your code. The analysis will show where you can cut HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code, remove unnecessary spaces, comments, etc. You also need to use Gzip compression, this will reduce the amount of data by 4-5 times, and the download speed will increase. If you use the browser cache, then it will save all site files on your computer, and next time the pages will load much faster. To accurately analyse the server response speed, you can use a special tool, for example, Google Page-speed Insights. Following those simple recommendations from our website development agency, you can make your website work faster and do not harm the design or functionality.

Are you looking for a website agency that can optimise your website? Our website development agency is ready to offer professional website development and search engine optimisation services, installation of additional functionality and 24/7 site support.

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