Understanding and reducing your SMB website’s page loading time
A page’s loading time plays a big part in its visibility and popularity. Many know this, but few know that it’s just as important for a SMB’s website. Let’s discover why loading time must be taken into account when building your site and how to reduce it.
1. Loading time: an essential element in terms of SEO
Your site’s loading time affects your good referencing. Google officially announced (in 2010) that a website’s loading time is considered as one of the influencing criteria for a site’s SEO.
Google considers that more than 1.5 seconds as a display time is “too long”. A website where all the pages take 5 seconds to load will then be assigned to last place by search engines.
The reason is relatively simple. In order to provide the best search results, Google offers its users answers tailored to their search. Thus, when a surfer leaves your website because of an excessively long loading time, Google considers that the posting of this site in their results was not pertinent and assigns it a less advantageous position.
2. A slow loading time or losing customers
You’ve understood it by now, referencing and bounce rates are intimately linked.
Let’s explain, an abnormally long loading time will consequently push your visitors to leave, increasing what’s called bounce rates. In other words, it’s the number of surfers that consult only one page and then leave. Thus, a high bounce rate negatively impacts your referencing because it means that the content wasn’t suited to the search made.
But furthermore, a high bounce rate supposes less traffic, less visibility and thus less sales. Basically, it means negative performance in general for your small business’ website.
3. GTmetrix: the tool to check your site’s loading time
Optimizing the website pages’ loading time is therefore indispensable: for your referencing but also so your surfers have a pleasant navigational experience. Without this, your site’s existence loses interest.
This said, before improving loading times, you must be able to test your site’s performance. GTmetrix is an excellent tool and ally to achieve this. All you have to do is put in the URL you want analyzed and the software takes care of the rest. This free tool offers then a precise analysis through the examination of about twenty criteria (image size, amount of redirections, etc.).
If you have built a site with the Heek editor, don’t hesitate to test it out.
4. Methods to reduce your small business site’s loading time
The analysis provided by this tool listed above or any other tool offering the same services will help you figure out the elements negatively affecting your small business website’s loading time.
We can also discover a list of elements to take into account when you are looking to optimize loading time:
- Choosing quality hosting. In fact, the characteristics of the server where your data is stored play a big role in the pages’ loading time.
- Resize your image to the actual final loaded post.
- Compress your images with tools like Kraken.
- Minimize the number of plugins external to your editor.
- Minimize the number of share icons.
- Minimize the number of CSS and JavaScript files (or interactive content). Though you should know that there are several tools letting you compress the codes on these types of files. It’s a relatively complex operation if you don’t know much about web development. Pay special attention to this point. Before choosing an editor test a site built with it.
Obviously, other methods exist, other than these above. But that would be going into technical details left to a professional.
In short, your pages loading time is an essential element to take into account, even and especially when you’re the head of an SMB. It’s often the small things that make a difference… You should know that by using a site editor, besides the financial advantages, you can benefit from quality development and optimize loading time. Discover now the many features Heek has to offer.