The Basics of Website Load Time

We all love a fast website, but even as web designers, how often do we focus on improving the speed of a website? Although we all know it’s important, sadly, we tend to forget about the need to optimize website load time. And this is costly.

According to the inimitable Geoff Kenyon, a professional web design and development analyst whose work has been consumed by millions, a website that takes over 5 seconds to load will have double the bounce rate.

You may be thinking to yourself: “5 seconds sounds like a long time – and I doubt there are many sites out there that take that long to load.”

In 2011, Mr. Kenyon came out with a study discovering that nearly one fourth of every website in existence takes longer than 5 seconds or more to load. That is twenty five percent! Definitely not something to be proud of.

His study went on to discover that sites that load in 2.9 seconds are faster than approximately fifty percent of the websites in existence. If it loads in 1.7 seconds – it’s faster than approximately seventy-five percent. And if it loads in .8 seconds, it’s faster than ninety-four percent.

There’s a lot that needs to be done to optimize load time across the world wide web. This takes some tech savvy and web design and development experience – something that we can’t say is all that common a skill. Even many SEOs focus solely on search engine optimization and choose to forego learning about website speed and all the goodies that go along with optimizing it.

Fortunately, there are some tools that we can personally recommend to folks out there who seem at a loss when they even think about trying to increase their site’s speed.

The list we have compiled is illustrative, and my no means exhaustive. We could have listed ten or even twenty tools, but we thought that may result in information overload. Instead, we’ll list four. Hopefully they will do you enough good and help you increase your speed. If you are looking for more, you can always check out the Networtech articles written on the subject in the past.

• Google Page Insights: Google Page Insights has long been a favorite of ours. And it comes as no surprise. Google’s personal tool in checking page speed performance is definitely going to be the best way to find out how fast your site is in the first place. Insights has a specific score range that helps gives you a relative understanding of how well your site is performing. The best thing about it is that it also measures the speed of your mobile view.
• Pingdom: Pingdom has become pretty popular over the years. What it does is counter-check your site against all the other sites they have tested, giving you a fairly accurate and objective reference point.
• GTmetrix: GTmetrix basically offers action insights on how to optimize the speed of your web pages. Under its tutelage, you can go step by step through the process and make sure that you are covering all the necessary tasks associated with improving page speed.
• WebPageTest: This enables testing on a number of different platforms with the use of realistic data. Like the three mentioned above, it is a regularly used tool to ensure that your site is performing at an optimal level.

We all love a fast website, but even as web designers, how often do we focus on improving the speed of a website? Although we all know it’s important, sadly, we tend to forget about the need to optimize website load time. And this is costly.

According to the inimitable Geoff Kenyon, a professional web design and development analyst whose work has been consumed by millions, a website that takes over 5 seconds to load will have double the bounce rate.

You may be thinking to yourself: “5 seconds sounds like a long time – and I doubt there are many sites out there that take that long to load.”

In 2011, Mr. Kenyon came out with a study discovering that nearly one fourth of every website in existence takes longer than 5 seconds or more to load. That is twenty five percent! Definitely not something to be proud of.

His study went on to discover that sites that load in 2.9 seconds are faster than approximately fifty percent of the websites in existence. If it loads in 1.7 seconds – it’s faster than approximately seventy-five percent. And if it loads in .8 seconds, it’s faster than ninety-four percent.

There’s a lot that needs to be done to optimize load time across the world wide web. This takes some tech savvy and web design and development experience – something that we can’t say is all that common a skill. Even many SEOs focus solely on search engine optimization and choose to forego learning about website speed and all the goodies that go along with optimizing it.

Fortunately, there are some tools that we can personally recommend to folks out there who seem at a loss when they even think about trying to increase their site’s speed.

The list we have compiled is illustrative, and my no means exhaustive. We could have listed ten or even twenty tools, but we thought that may result in information overload. Instead, we’ll list four. Hopefully they will do you enough good and help you increase your speed. If you are looking for more, you can always check out the Networtech articles written on the subject in the past.

• Google Page Insights: Google Page Insights has long been a favorite of ours. And it comes as no surprise. Google’s personal tool in checking page speed performance is definitely going to be the best way to find out how fast your site is in the first place. Insights has a specific score range that helps gives you a relative understanding of how well your site is performing. The best thing about it is that it also measures the speed of your mobile view.
• Pingdom: Pingdom has become pretty popular over the years. What it does is counter-check your site against all the other sites they have tested, giving you a fairly accurate and objective reference point.
• GTmetrix: GTmetrix basically offers action insights on how to optimize the speed of your web pages. Under its tutelage, you can go step by step through the process and make sure that you are covering all the necessary tasks associated with improving page speed.
• WebPageTest: This enables testing on a number of different platforms with the use of realistic data. Like the three mentioned above, it is a regularly used tool to ensure that your site is performing at an optimal level.