Why it's so important that your website loads quickly

Studies by web analytics company Kissmetrics reveal that a single second of loading time on a page can result in a 7% drop in conversions, with 40% of users abandoning the website completely if it takes longer than three seconds to appear on their screen.

Slower websites could even find themselves dropping down Google's search listings now, with loading speed being taken in to account when ranking results.

"As a product manager you should know that speed is product feature number one."
Larry Page - CEO of Google

So what can be done to make sure your site doesn't fall in to any of these traps?

Caching generated pages on the server.

For example pages that are generated from a database, but don’t change very often once they have been saved - for example, blog articles. Once the server has generated the page for one user, it doesn't need to spend time pulling the data back out of the database and building the page if it's accessed again within a reasonable time.

Caching in the user's browser.

If the same user re-visits the same page again within a reasonable amount of time, there is no reason for their browser to download anything at all. The server can be configured to tell the browser that nothing has changed, and the page will be loaded from the user's own computer.

“Minifying” code wherever possible.

Once a website is ready to be deployed to a live server, the HTML, CSS and Javascript behind it no longer needs to be hand edited by a human - and, while cutting out unnecessary white space, comments and long function names etc may seem insignificant, it can add up to a substantial speed boost. This is usually done automatically as the page is requested by a user, keeping the original code intact behind the scenes.

Optimising images

This is still just as important as it always has been. A visitor shouldn’t be forced to download a high resolution, print ready photo of one of your products if you only intend to show them a small thumbnail.

Monitoring services such as Pingdom can provide regular reports on page loading times to help your web team quickly identify any problems and get them fixed.
 

Photo by Sander van der Wel.