When it comes to performance, loading speed is one of the most important factors on web pages. However, unless you know how the metrics work, and especially the factors metrics work and especially the factors that affect it, you may find it difficult to improve them.
To reduce bounce rate and improve visitor engagement, it is essential that your site loads as quickly as possible.
Site speed can not only help you improve the user experience (UX) but also help you improve your site's ranking in Google search results (SEO).
When it comes to site speed every second counts. It is a fact, a research conducted by Google concluded that for every 3 seconds of waiting, the bounce rate (A bounce occurs when a surfer leaves the site after viewing a single web page, within a few seconds.) increases to 32% and from 1 to 5 seconds the bounce rate increases to 90%.
In other words, if your page does not load in a few seconds, the possibility increases the user leaves the page. Additionally, if you are investing in campaigns to generate traffic you are wasting part of your budget and reducing the probability of engagement and conversion.
Before making any changes to your website, you must first calibrate the performance. There are several tools to do this: Metricspot, WooRank, Pingdom Website Speed Test, GTMetrix these are user friendly tools.
However, we recommend starting with Google PageSpeed Insights, it is a very useful tool. easy to use that allows you to measure the speed of your site on mobile and desktop. It also gives you valuable information that helps you implement performance actions so that your site has a better result in Google search.
To use PageSpeed Insights simply enter your URL and it will give you a result from 0 to 100 to measure your page. Below the list you can find one list of suggestions to increase the speed of your site.
The tool gives you solid information for suggestions and actions. A starting point in order to start improving the loading speed.
The use of plugins that complement your site may be affecting the speed of load of it. There are different tools that can help us in some things but they may be hurting others, therefore they may be affecting your positioning in search results in Google. Plugins like Facebook Chat or Hotjar may benefit you in some way, however it is important that you do an evaluation so you can decide whether to delete them or continue with them. exist different ways of doing this implementation so that they do not affect the speed of load; We recommend doing your research or approaching a developer with experience.
Optimizing images is critical as it can be one of the features that They are affecting the load of your web page with more seconds. That is why very It is important to use both the correct size and the correct format for each image. Currently there are last generation formats that compress to the maximum images as .webp which already has support for Firefox and Safari. Also if you want to use an image for each resolution you have to take into account that for the mobile version you need to use smaller images and desktop images with larger size.
Many times to save money we hire services that are not of the best quality and that can be expensive, you may have the best web development, than your images are compressed to the maximum, that you have the most simplified code but if the quality of your hosting services is not good the loading times of the services of the server will be very slow.
Using pages or libraries to create sites like Wix, Wordpress, Boostrap by mention some examples, they can lead us to generate very slow pages, the CSS and Javascript file overhead that these pages use is sometimes too much, much of this code is not necessary for operation but it does affect the loading speed of your website. Professional development with state-of-the-art technologies such as React with NextJS, Gatsby, etc. what are optimization-oriented and developer-focused can help us to implement memorable user experiences that will help you achieve the results you need.
Now that you know what are the main loading speed errors of your site, we recommend that you make all the changes that are within your reach so that the user experience is excellent and your search results can go up. If you want to learn more about the subject and understand details. Download the e-book Deep site speed analysis for marketers.