47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less (Akamai). How fast does your website load? Google places a lot of weight on the speed and load time of your website. Search engines want their users to have the best possible experience and know how frustrated and impatient we can get with slow load times. Thus, the longer it takes your website to load, the further you will drop in search engine rankings.
In order to improve the user experience of your website, you need to first improve your site speed. And there are quite a few factors that go into doing so! Pingdom offers a great free tool for testing website speed. Take a moment to test yours.
If your website could use a little jump start then complete the checklist below to identify areas of improvement.
Web Speed Checklist
- Remove any unnecessary videos or images
- Reduce the file size of your images
- Minimize Redirects
- Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Get rid of all the plug-ins you do not use
- Enable Browser Caching
- Minimize HTTP Requests by using CSS instead of images whenever possible
- Keep your code clean by removing any empty tags
If you’re not sure how your website stacks up against this checklist, ask your developer to look into it for you. Informatics Inc. is also available to run speed diagnostics against your website in order to find bottlenecks. Contact us today for more information on improving website speed. For more details on some of the items in this checklist, visit our blog on 4 Ways to Improve Website Speed.
