Website speed is important for digital marketing success.
We’ve all heard that the website is king. But how often do you think about how much of your marketing efforts are going towards it? Do you think about it at all? We don’t. It’s an obvious fact, but too often it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
For our purposes here, we won’t be doing anything fancy: just two things: one simple thing which is already in place and another more advanced one which makes the site much faster (and well worth implementing). I will also leave out our discussion of other things that are important for digital marketing success — like SEO and social media — because they are outside the scope here.
What is website speed?
For a small company with limited resources, website speed is a huge concern. Despite the fact that Google has said that speed is an important factor in their ranking algorithms, many companies have been finding their sites take too long to load and are thus slowing down their traffic.
There are specific factors to consider:
- Speed of connection between your server and the web server (e.g., you might be hosted on AWS servers instead of your own servers).
- Speed of your users connecting/uploading content (there are many more factors involved here).
- Speed of your content being transferred over the internet (your bandwidth usage can also affect this).
For example, if you’re hosting your pages on Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage, be sure to look at how fast they are transferring objects — perhaps Google can help you optimise there.
Why is website speed important?
Landing pages are usually the most important page on your website. We know that they are the page where you want to convert your visitors into customers and stay there as long as possible. So, it is important that this landing page is fast and responsive, which is a complicated problem to solve in practice.
It’s not something that can be solved by adding some javascript or a CSS3 animation. The main problem we have with landing pages is that they interrupt our UX flow from the moment they appear until the moment we are redirected back to the previous step of our flow by the server.
There are three main reasons for this problem:
1.) The delay in loading caused by loading resources (as mentioned above)
2.) The delay in user interaction caused by waiting for server responses (e.g., when you should be getting back to a step you have already completed)
3.) The delay in user interaction caused by waiting for server responses (e.g., when you should be getting back to a step you have already completed)
These problems are exacerbated if we do not provide an elegant solution. What can we do? How can we improve our speed? When it comes to improving site speed, there are many tools available nowadays and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
For example, some tools like Google PageSpeed Insights help us understand how fast a website loads and so they let us tweak our site speed accordingly; but they also cost money and usually require us to pay for their services every single month or so (I’ve seen people who paid as little as $5/month on top of their custom hosting).
And I don’t think such tools will help us with this problem because our goal is not just optimising things like Google PageSpeed Insights but rather making our site work well for all user types, styles of design, etc.; plus these things just *are* part of product-market fit.
We believe that paying for these services multiple times per year only serves to alienate users from your product — especially those who might be willing to pay more than what most people think it costs to use your product – which leads to increased churn at best and less investment-based growth at worst (which also affects ROI).
How can you improve your website speed?
Even though you have a very good website, it is not always being used as efficiently as it could be. If your time-to-results metrics are low, it is usually because your site is not fast enough for the people who need to access them.
The allure of faster website speed is a tempting one, but you need to overcome the inertia and make a change before you send traffic away from your site.
For more information about improving website speed, see our article on 10 ways to improve your website speed and our blog post on how to improve your website speed with Google Analytics .
Host with a reputable provider
Website hosting is an important factor in digital marketing success. As we know, the web is a distributed medium and the speed of your website is determined by how fast it can access the information it needs to function properly.
The easiest way to be able to provide top-notch service that will keep your customers coming back for more is to use a reputable provider who knows what they’re doing.
Few things are as easy as hosting a website with a reputable provider, and in fact, several tools make this task very simple by allowing you to select each component (like domain registration, hosting) and letting you choose among up to five different plans so that you can find the one that best suits your needs.
In this post, we discuss how:
- Using preferred supplier services ensures that your website receives optimal support from its chosen provider.
- Choosing a host services provider ensures that your site reaches its optimum performance.
- Hosting a website means having an access point on which visitors can find their way around it easily. If visitors cannot find their way around your site (e.g., due to location restrictions), they should not be able to access it at all!
Use a content delivery network
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network that facilitates the delivery of content to your browser, as well as making it relatively inexpensive to host websites. This is especially important for small- and medium-sized businesses who don’t have the bandwidth to maintain their own CDN network or can’t afford to pay for CDN hosting.
A number of companies, including Google and Amazon, offer CDNs. If you want to learn more about how this service works, you may want to read this post on how Google uses a content delivery network. Another great resource is this article from a popular Canadian online retailer which covers the various options available:
Optimise your images
Optimising your images is a complex and important part of building a site that ranks well. There are many factors to consider when you’re optimising them, such as the size of your image and number of colours in it, and more.
In this post we discuss the importance of optimising your images, in particular those that are most visible on the page.
The first point is that optimising image sizes can be confusing. A good rule of thumb is to keep the largest image on your homepage at 500 pixels wide by 400 pixels tall. That makes sense because if you have a larger image, it will take up more space (as a percentage) than smaller images, so you will get the benefit of containing it within the ‘minimum’ widths for responsive websites, which tend to be between 200-300 pixels wide in most cases.
If you expand this outside of the home page and into other areas on your site (such as product pages), then it becomes clear that 300 pixels allows for almost all text on these pages (no logos or anything else) and 500 pixels means virtually no text – all images are being optimised for size!
That’s why I really like using JPEG compression for these things; with PNGs you will lose some quality due to how much space they take up (compare this with JPG with 8 bit colour depth).
However, there is also another way to do this: use variables with min and max values – instead of just maxing out at 500 pixels, set min 1 pixel smaller at 300 x 300 pixels and so on until they run out of space.
The problem here is that this can still leave too much room around imagery which could potentially make browsers zoom right in to see what’s going on in them (which would make them harder to read), so it’s advisable to use an absolute size.
Minimise your HTTP requests
HTTP requests is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, a protocol used to transfer files from one computer to another. There are many web technologies that make it possible to obtain information and perform actions at the same time a file gets transferred.
For example, you can use HTML documents as files and send them via email or transfer them across the internet to your mobile phone. You can also use graphics that would be too large and cumbersome to transmit on paper.
All these tools are built on HTTP requests, which are made using URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). These URLs are used to identify resources (e.g., images, text) that should be accessed in specific ways, such as by the user’s browser or by the server (which is the place where you keep all your files).
This database is important because it contains only those images that were present when this website was created — before its content has been modified. It doesn’t contain older versions of the same image; instead they all need to be updated with new ones.
Use a caching plugin
Site speed has become an important factor in both web design and in internet marketing. There are many different plugins available to improve your site speed, but the most common ones are:
- Google PageSpeed Insights – This provides useful insights into how a page loads on your site and helps determine the best browser configuration for the page that will result in the fastest page load time. However, this plugin is not yet supported by Google so we have to use which is more robust than PageSpeed Insights as Google does not yet allow plugins to modify its cache.
- BlackCat – Allows you to change the default method of CSS compression from gzip compression to bzip2 compression (which is slower, but more secure). This plugin works with some major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
- GitHub Pages – Allows you to override the built-in CSS loading logic of a given repository so that it loads faster from a server rather than from your local copy of it (as it would on a regular web server).
You can also use these plugins with other web servers like nginx: https://github.com/IgorKubalov/gitpages/wiki/My-GitPages-Plugins#Configure-GitPages-for-nginx
Conclusion
Learning to improve your website speed is important for digital marketing success.
Whenever we see a large amount of traffic coming our way on a given day, we run the site speed test. In this post you will learn how to do a free website speed test with Google’s Chrome browser.
The Google website speed test is a simple web-based tool that lets you judge how fast your web pages load. It measures the time it takes for your browser to retrieve and display web pages, as well as the number of times the page has been refreshed.
As far as we know, this test isn’t just useful for web designers and business owners; it is also valuable for marketers who need to optimise their online marketing efforts. The speed test comes in handy so that you can better understand your website’s performance and ensure that it is being viewed by users without any delays or delays getting in the way of their browsing experience.
This is important because most people don’t spend much time on the internet, which means that you need to compensate for poor page loading times by actually showing more relevant content (and not just clickbait).
