Website loading speed is an important characteristic for website promotion, as it significantly affects user behavior. If a page takes a long time to open, visitors will mostly close it and move on to competitors. Google takes into account the number of bounces, so a website from which users immediately leave sinks in the rankings.
But the main reason why you need to improve the loading speed is that users should be comfortable. After all, the owners of a web resource need their customers to be interested and comfortable, so that they come to the site and tell other people about it. VPS-UP specialists consider the most important aspects of this topic.
Key metrics
Let’s take a look at the most popular download speed metrics:
- Time To First Byte – a good indicator should be 2-3 seconds. This is the period of time between the receipt of a request to the hosting where the site is located and the receipt of the first byte of the response. In the interval between these stages, the request is processed: redirection, etc.
- First Contentful Paint is an important indicator that should be no more than 1.8 seconds. This is the time before the rendering appears.
- Largest Contentful Paint – the best time is 2.5 seconds. This is the period of time during which most of the content has already appeared on the screen and is available for viewing. To determine this metric, the display time of the largest component (text block or graphic image) is used.
- First Input Delay is a metric that should be 1 second or less. This is the period of time when the visitor started interacting with interactive components (pressed a button, entered text, followed a link) before the browser responded to these actions.
- Time To Interactive is the time before the content is displayed and when the site visitor can not only see it but also start interacting with it.
- Interaction to Next Paint – the indicator should be at the level of 200 milliseconds. This is the amount of time that should pass between a user’s click and the response after the site is fully loaded.
- Total Blocking Time – the optimal time for this metric should be 300 milliseconds. This is the total blocking time from the moment when the rendering started (FCP) to interactivity (TTI). The visitor can already see the content, but cannot yet start interacting.
- Cumulative Layout Shift is one of the most important indicators of loading speed, which is crucial for the reputation of any website. It shows the shift in layout due to the loading of the heaviest element. Imagine that a visitor opened a page and clicked on the required link, but at that moment a block that took too long to load opened above it. As a result, the layout moved and the link ended up at the bottom of the page, meaning that the visitor clicked on the ad instead, and the advertiser’s website began to load. The metric is based on a period of time up to 5 seconds when the movement takes place, with an interval of less than 1 second.
- Speed Index – shows the speed of page content rendering during loading. For example, the main content took 5 seconds to load. But during the first seconds, the visitor may see a blank white canvas, or small details may be rendered from the very first second. It is important to understand that it is better for the user to see movement on the page than to watch a static white screen. Therefore, even if certain small elements are displayed during the loading process, this indicates that the site is actively loading. This has a positive effect on the user experience.
- Core Web Vitals is a metric that combines the following metrics: key content rendering (LCP), time to interaction (FID), and page content shift (CLS). Google recognizes these metrics as the most important.
How to determine the website loading speed
Several tools (many of which are free) can be used to determine the main download metrics. These tools can analyze data on a variety of metrics, and the results may vary from service to service, which is why it’s best to check with several tools and then compare the results.
One of the practical possibilities is a second-by-second “storyboard” of the site, which helps to understand what users see at different stages of loading.
Tools most often used to determine website speed:
- Web Vitals для Chrome;
- WebPageTest;
- Lighthouse;
- GTmetrix;
- Google PageSpeed Insights;
- Pingdom Website Speed Test.
You do not need to calculate the download speed yourself. The tools automatically set the level of indicators: high-quality results are highlighted in green, acceptable results in orange, and low results in red.
Read also: What Cloudflare is used for and how it affects the website
How to improve your speed
Every webmaster would like all metrics to be “green”. But it’s not necessary that the results should be 100%. Moreover, some metrics do not have a radical impact on how the user perceives the site, but require a lot of time to correct minor errors. It’s more important to keep the main metrics within acceptable limits to make the site user-friendly.
To improve loading speed, you can use methods that are universal for all websites.
Implement the recommendations offered by the service
Analyzing the website, each service detects errors and recommends methods to fix them.
Improve content, code, and database
How fast the page loads depends to a large extent on the parameters of the media content: many heavy files (images, videos) will slow down the page. Images should be compressed using the webp format to reduce their weight without losing quality.
You can use Lazy Loading to show the visitor the first content as soon as possible. Then the images on the screen will be loaded, and the rest (the invisible part of the page) will appear as needed. That is, the resource will not be spent on displaying the entire page at once and the overall loading time will be reduced.
It is necessary to identify code sections that are not used or are performed very little. Tools for improving the code, which lead to its automatic compression, will come in handy. You should regularly clean the database from outdated information.
Use only the necessary modules on the CMS
You should choose only those modules and plugins that work with high efficiency, because they significantly load the site. You should regularly check the plugins in the admin panel to see which ones are no longer needed. Such plugins should be disabled or removed.
Connect server caching
This makes it possible to create and save regularly recurring scripts for active websites in RAM.
Choose high quality hosting or server rental
A website requires shared hosting or server rental – this is determined by its resource intensity. It is important to keep in mind that the download speed also depends on the technical condition of the server.
Therefore, choose responsible hosting providers that have a reputable reputation that is confirmed by customer reviews. Such providers use good quality components and monitor the functioning of servers at all times.
Do not try to save money in this case, because good components and the help of experienced professionals cannot be cheap. Saving money on hosting can lead to low-quality services, as a result of which all actions to optimize speed will be in vain and will not provide the expected result.
