The great Mahatma Gandhi once said, “The one who loses patience loses the battle.” But when it comes to website speed, if your customer has to be patient enough to load the website, then you are the one who will lose the battle, because the website with better page speed loading is winning it.
Also, you will be well aware of the quote “Patience is a virtue“, but here the virtue gets smashed under the foot when customers encounter slow page load times. Even a few milliseconds can affect a lot when it comes to website page speed loading.
If your WordPress site takes a long time to load, people will leave the page, and the bounce rate will go up. If this happens, your website will start to rank low and you won’t be able to turn as many leads into sales, which will hurt your overall business revenue.
And as one of the businessmen in the world said,
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
—Bill Gates
What is Page Load Speed?
Page load time refers to the average amount of time it takes for a page to appear on your screen. It is computed from the time you click on a website link or enter a Web URL until the time the page entirely loads in the browser.
In terms of both the quality of the user experience and the functionality of the website, there are three primary aspects of page speed that need to be understood:
- The perspective of the amount of time necessary to send the content that was requested along with any supporting HTML content to the browser.
- The response is given by the browser to the requests to load pages.
- The final empirical measure of how fast a website load is the user’s view of the requested web page as it appears in the browser.
It is important to keep in mind that page speed, user experience, website responsiveness, and a vast array of other factors affect a website’s performance.
They are some of the critical variables that are incorporated into search engine rankings as a result of the website’s performance. Which indirectly influences the rankings in search engines designed with proprietary algorithms.
How Does Page Speed Affect the User Experience?
The one whose website is faster will reap all the benefits, and the one whose website page speed is slow will say, “The grapes are sour.”
According to a survey conducted by Pingdom, it is said that as long as your website loading speed is between 2 and 3 seconds, the average bounce rate of your website will be just 9%, which is very nominal, but as soon as the website loading speed is increased to 5 seconds, the bounce rate will skyrocket to 38%.
This 2-second time difference will cost you millions of rupees as well as users who will go to the site that will have a 2-second loading time instead of a 5-second one.
It is not like once you become a big brand like Amazon or Nike, you don’t need to take website page speed into consideration. Even after being relevant, you still need to make the page load into consideration.
For every 1 second delay in site loading, the BBC loses 10% of its users. Also, Yahoo! cut the time it took for pages to load to 0.4, which caused a sudden uptick in traffic of up to 9%.
In addition, page speed is a factor in how well your company will perform in comparison to the other companies in its industry.
If a customer makes a purchase on an e-commerce website and then has an unhappy experience, 79% of them are less likely to make another purchase from that site, while 64% are more likely to shop at a different online store.
Common Reasons for Slow Page Loading
1. Server Delay
“Server response time” is the amount of time it takes for your server to load the important HTML code before it can start making the page. In most cases, the time it takes for the server to respond should be lower than 200 milliseconds.
There are a great number of factors that could cause your server’s response time to be slower, but they can be broken down into the following three categories:
- Slow logic application.
- Insufficient equipment assets.
- Sluggish network connectivity.
Read more about – How to Improve Server Response Time.
2. Unoptimized Images
Aesthetically pleasing media, such as videos, images, and logos, is particularly effective at capturing the attention of site visitors and keeping them engaged with your website. On the other hand, when it comes to the page speed at which pages load, multimedia is notoriously slow.
One of the most common reasons why websites take a long time to load is that they have media on them that hasn’t been optimized. Massive files are used to store media such as videos, photographs, and logos.
The size of the file download has a direct effect on how long it takes to load a website. Media with a high resolution may take a long time to load, which will cause the page to load much more slowly overall.
In addition, Google is unable to view images, including photographs. Instead, they read alt tags, which enable you to give a concise description of the image in three to four words. However, Google has no notion of what your images are because you have not provided this description.
3. Unclean Code
Slow websites are frequently the result of unclean code being used on the site. The process of developing code for a website is, in some ways, comparable to the process of writing a letter. Someone could be extremely eloquent and write a very lengthy letter.
This letter could be rewritten by another person in such a way that it is significantly shortened. Similarly, a website’s source code could contain huge quantities of content that are not required. Alternatively, the code might be cleaned up in such a way that it is simpler for a web browser to understand.
A website’s load time will be slowed significantly if it has many large and dense elements. The coding used to create web pages is one component that contributes to this issue. Effective website design necessitates extensive coding.
It takes 60 million lines of code to keep Facebook running, and two billion lines of code are required to maintain Google’s internet services.
The size of your CSS can inflate out of control if your website has unclean code, which comprises unnecessary components such as excessive whitespace, inline styles, and empty new lines. If you’re developing the basis of your website, always “work smarter, rather than harder.”
4. Unnecessary Redirects
It is common practice to make use of redirects in situations where a website contains several references to the same URL, and changing all of those references to the new address would take an excessive amount of time.
You can set up a redirect so that it will take a visitor to a new location whenever they visit the old URL by configuring it in your browser.
However, even though it can be helpful in a variety of contexts, it does have some drawbacks. When you put a redirect, the user has to wait for the page to load again before they can continue using the page.
The amount of time it takes for a website to load will increase by a factor of two if you use an excessive number of redirects.
5. Bad Plugins
A website’s loading speed can be slowed by the use of plugins. Having a smaller number of plugins is usually ideal when it comes to WordPress website page speed. It’s possible to slow down your website by using an excessive number of plug-ins on your site.
When it comes to keeping your website secure, there are many downloadable plugin options that you may use. All plugins will tell you that you need them to improve your website’s internal functions.
When using a blogging platform like WordPress, you are likely to have a significant number of plugins installed on your website. WordPress is well-known for promoting the use of third-party plug-ins to extend its functionality.
Your website’s loading performance will be negatively impacted by every plugin you install. To fix this, you need to decide which plugins you need to keep and which you can get rid of.
How to Improve Page Speed for a Better User Experience
1. Minify CSS & JavaScript
When users access specific files on your website, your server will make a high number of HTTP requests since your website has a large number of JavaScript and CSS files.
Because each of these requests is processed independently by the browser of the website visitor, the operation of the website is slowed down. Your website will undoubtedly load much more quickly if you cut down on the number of JavaScript and CSS files that it uses.
Make an effort to organize all of the JavaScript files and all the CSS files together. Because of this, the total number of HTTP requests that are made will decrease.
There is a wide variety of software available that can swiftly minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. With this, your WordPress page speed optimization will be carried out and your website will load faster.
2. Content Delivery Network
Are you interested in learning how to speed up the loading of web pages? Cut down on the amount of distance that data has to travel from your server to the person using it. That’s logical, isn’t it?
Utilizing a Content Delivery Network, often known as a CDN, is a simple way that can be used to accomplish this objective.
A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers that are spread out over multiple locations. They work together to speed up how quickly the content on your website is delivered.
A CDN is an effective technique to increase the page speed of a website, regardless of whether the website in question contains HTML, JavaScript, stylesheets, photos, or videos. With the help of this, your WordPress site will load faster.
3. Remove Unnecessary Plugins
There are different types of plugins for different kinds of purposes. If a WordPress site has an excessive number of plugins, this could result in unnecessary bloat and slow down the website’s performance.
In addition, outdated plugins or ones with inadequate maintenance could pose a security risk and introduce compatibility concerns, both of which would result in a performance decrease.
Because of this, you should try to use as few plugins as possible on your WordPress site. One of the easiest ways to achieve this goal is to turn off and delete any plugins that aren’t being used right now.
4. Image Optimization
What is one of the most common things that cause websites to load slowly?
Exceptionally large photos. We came across websites that had graphics that were greater than 1MB and 5MB in size. scary! Make sure you don’t do it.
Large image files will slow down the page speed at which your landing page loads, which will make the visitor wait (often in frustration).
Your images should be optimized, but the image quality should not be compromised. You want a website with few image files, but you want to prevent having it look like an amateur effort.
WordPress users have access to a wide variety of plugins that improve image optimization. We like TinyPNG and Squoosh. With these two, you can compress your images and reduce the total image file size. This will optimize the page speed of your WordPress site.
5. Try Lazy Loading
Following the advice that you make use of a single CSS stylesheet and do not include any inline CSS, there is a limitation that you need to take into consideration.
You can make the portion above the fold (the top of the page) load faster even if the rest of the page takes a few seconds to load. This technique is known as lazy loading and is especially useful for pages that have a large amount of content listed below the fold of the page but still manage to be readable.
Take, for instance, the case where you are writing a blog post that contains twenty photographs. Before showing any of the content on the page, a user’s browser would typically have to finish downloading all of these photographs first.
When you use lazy loading, the content that is currently displayed can be loaded first, and then the rest of the photos can be loaded after that. Because this is the case, the user does not need to wait for the page to load and the images will begin to load at the same time as the page loads.
This has the potential to significantly cut load times for posts that contain a lot of photographs.
6. Reduce Redirections
Redirects may be needed when switching to a new domain. However, removing unwanted redirects from your website can result in much faster page loads.
Your website’s load times could be severely slowed down if it has an excessive number of redirects. The time it takes for a page to complete an HTTP request and receive a response is increased every time the page redirects.
You can discover all of the redirections on your website and the destinations to which they point by using software like Screaming Frog.
Because of this, it ought to become less difficult to recognize redirects that are of little benefit. After that, you can delete the ones that aren’t necessary by using the .htaccess file that’s located on your website.
7. Install a WordPress Caching Plugin
One of the most common and effective strategies for increasing the page speed of your WordPress site is to make use of caching plugins. A caching plugin will save a copy of your website’s most recent view for users who revisit it later.
This indicates that WordPress won’t be required to build it for subsequent site visitors after this point. This data might be formatted using HTML, JS, or CSS; it might also include images, fonts, or Flash files.
The Most Important Factor of User Experience: Core Web Vital
Core Web Vitals is one of the main components of all the SEO tactics that need to be taken into consideration. Core web vitals are a set of standardized metrics that have been developed by Google to assist web developers in better comprehending how users perceive a web page.
Although the Core Web Vitals were designed with developers in mind, all website proprietors can make use of the tools provided because they dissect the experience that a user has while navigating a page.
Core Web Vitals identifies problems with the user experience by developing a metric for each of the three most important facets of the user experience, which are as follows:
- Page loading performance.
- Ease of interaction.
- Visual stability of a page from a user’s perspective.
Independent measurements help break down the many parts into smaller ones, which makes it easier for site owners to find and fix technical problems on all sites.
These independent measurements help break down the many elements into smaller pieces, enabling site owners to discover and resolve technical issues across all websites.
Developers have to think about the whole “user experience,” but that doesn’t make these measurements any less important.
In order to make immediate improvements to your websites, let’s have a look at the three primary indicators that are featured in Core Web Vitals.
Page Loading Performance: Largest Contentful Paint
Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP, is a core web vital that measures, in seconds, the amount of time that has passed between the point at which the loading of the page commences and the point at which the picture or text element that takes up the most screen space shows.
Its job is to check whether or not the page’s main content has finished loading before moving on. The lower the LCP, the more favorable it is.
Your score on the LCP can be interpreted as follows:
- Good: 2.5 seconds or less.
- It needs improvement: between 2.5 and 4 seconds.
- Poor: more than 4 seconds.
Ease of interaction: First Input Delay
The First Input Delay, also known as FID, is the second core web vital. This gives you a rough idea of how much time a user spends on your website.
It’s possible to define interaction as selecting an option from a menu, filling out a form, or utilizing the search bar to locate the items they’re looking for. Because of this, if your website has a lot of interactive parts, you need to give this core web vital a higher priority.
Due to the fact that this information can only be gathered in the field, FID is incredibly difficult to compute. This indicates that your score will be determined by factors beyond your control, such as the technical skills of your audience and the speeds at which they connect to the Internet.
Your score on the FID can be interpreted as follows:
- Good: less than 100ms.
- It needs improvement: between 100ms and 300ms.
- Poor: greater than 300ms.
Visual stability: Cumulative Layout Shift
You’ve probably seen websites where the entire page slides up and down while you browse through them. Many elements shifted at times. Every time something was loaded, it seemed as if the layout was changing, and eventually, there was a lot of movement.
This is now considered a poor user experience.
CLS is not generally measured in seconds like the vast majority of other characteristics are; It analyzes the motion of shaky components in the viewport depending on the size of the viewport and refers to elements that shift across two consecutive frames as instability elements.
The “impact fraction” and the “distance fraction” are both factors that go into calculating the layout shift score.
Your score on the CLS can be interpreted as follows:
- Good: less than 0.1.
- It needs improvement: between 0.1 to 0.25.
- Poor: more than 0.25.
Check Page Speed
GT Metrix
Gtmetrix checks how fast your website is by using Google Page Speed and Yahoo! In the waterfall chart, also gives details about each request so you can see which ones need to be optimized.
If you sign up for a free account, in addition to being able to do a scan from Canada, you will also be able to do so from Dallas, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, Sydney, and Sao Paulo.
Pingdom
The Pingdom Website Speed Test is a comprehensive tool for assessing the amount of time it takes for a website to load. With the free version of the software, you can look at seven different states of a browser’s file request from seven different servers in different parts of the world.
Now You Know How Important User Experience Is
If your WordPress site is one of the main ways you communicate with your customers, it could be hard to make it faster because there are so many different devices, and ways to connect to the internet, web browsers, and operating systems.
On the other hand, doing so would have a big positive influence on your company.
It is important to keep in mind that this process does not have a beginning or an end that is clearly defined. At this time, you don’t need to carry out all of the alterations that were suggested.
Spend some time going over the findings of the monitoring tool, make some changes to the website, and then evaluate how well it worked both before and after you made the changes.
