Purple Papers

How To Improve Your Website Load Time

Saturday, May 15, 2010 5:25 PM

By Ashley Gregory
Purple Trout SEO Specialist

Web developers and designers are always telling us they spend countless hours trying to speed up website download time because people are turned off by slow loading pages. Website load times have always been a major problem for web users.

Many studies have shown when a website takes more than eight seconds to load, the user will leave the site and probably won’t come back. Web surfers expect to see a page load in two seconds or less.

Slow loading will impact your company sales and have long-term negative effects that you may never consider possible. Making your website more reliable will directly translate into an increase in loyal consumers.

Longer load times are unavoidable in some circumstances, but it’s critical to keep the user informed of what is happening and how much longer the process should take. Here are some real life examples that are designed to keep users up to date while they wait for something to happen.

  1. Crosswalk countdown - Crosswalk signs have a countdown to tell pedestrians exactly how much longer they will have to wait.
  2. Taking a number - The “take a number” support system can be found in most department and grocery stores. Customers pull a ticket and wait for their number to be called. The customers are updated on their expected remaining wait time and position in the queue.

Taking real life waiting time into online:

 

Hulu

 

Hulu is a website that provides a form of entertainment for people to view while waiting for videos to load. Due to the nature of videos there will always be a period of waiting the user must endure. Instead of looking at a black screen, Hulu presents a slick loading graphic, such as animation graphic or advertisement, while users wait for their video to appear. Hulu also provides a countdown timer along the top of the screen. This timer serves two purposes:

  • Reducing frustration produces by waiting for the a video.
  • Giving the user a clear understanding of the time left until the entertainment begins.

Facebook

 

Facebook is a popular social networking website that allows users to upload content. When videos and photos are being added to a Facebook page, the user is given a status window with an image caption of the photo or video being uploaded.

 

Each of these examples showcases different ways to tell your user what is going on while a page or video is loading. By studying the ways major websites are experimenting with fun distractions, designers can incorporate these same methods to keep users interested and engaged.

 

Users and website developers are not the only ones giving page load time special attention. Google is developing a new search engine dedicated solely to measuring website load times and conveying the measurements in a user-friendly way.

 

Introducing Google Caffeine:

 

Google is rolling out “Caffeine” (the code name for its new search engine). Caffeine is expected to be faster and more accurate, provide better results and crawl larger parts of the web. SEO-minded experts say that they already notice faster search response times.

When Caffeine does roll out, what can you expect? Most people won’t even notice, because the look and feel of Google results won’t change. Caffeine will significantly speed up the speed at which Google presents results, especially in regards to photos and videos. Google should feel zippier and many of the results will feel more “real-time”, particularly for the generic searcher.

 

Page load time has become a factor in the way Google ranks websites and it is a recent addition to the search engine’s Webmaster Tools. There are two key things a webmaster must always keep in mind when designing a site:

  1. The Visitor
  2. Search Engines

The website load time can be affected by a number of factors including the size and complexity of documents on the website, the responsiveness and location of the site’s servers and the user’s internet connection speed. It does not matter how beautiful and informative the site is – if it takes too long to load, you may as well take the site down. 

What causes slow load time?

  1. The size of your HTML code
  2. Shared hosting account
  3. Unnecessary images
  4. Nested tables
  5. Not using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
  6. Extensive amounts of HTTP Requests
  7. Not using JavaScript
  8. Clutter

How to improve your slow load time:

Reduce the size of the HTML code

  • The fewer lines of code that have to be read the better!
  • Always validate your HTML against a valid DOCTYPE. This can expose issues with your code which can increase page load time, such as unclosed, improperly nested and orphan tags.
  • Take a few minutes of your time to look through your code and remove anything that serves no immediate purpose.

Host on a server or hosting company

  • The nearer a server is to your customers, the less distance and fewer “hoops” the data has to travel through to appear on their screens.
  • The larger a hosting company, the better and faster it is.

Don’t go overboard on images

  • Images take longer to load and large images take even longer. Try to decide if all your images are really needed.
  • Reduce the size of the images using Image Converters or an Online Image Optimizer. This will reduce the file size of your .gif, .jpg, or .pngs and your visitors will immediately be able to see the pages load faster!
  • Try to upload images to your own hosting to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
  • Always specify the height and width attributes for your images.

Avoided  nested tables

  • When placing a table inside another table it takes a lot longer for the browser to work out the spacing. It has to wait to read the entire .html file and then work out the layout. 
  • Try using Cascading Style Sheets or CSS to create the columns on your page.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

  • The advantage of using CSS is a web browser cache can directly read the .css files once and retrieves it instead of reading fonts and style on a page at every occurrence. This saves a lot of time for the browser and your website will load faster. 
  • When you put all fonts and color information as well as other design specs into a CSS file and call it from the page header, you have shortened the code and removed lots of junk that search engine crawlers read.

 Reduce the HTTP Requests

  • Combine files and reduce the overall size of your website.
  • Limit the number of embedded images, headers, styling features. 
  • Make sure that your requests for external files or scripts are combined in a single location.

JavaScript

  • Using external JavaScripts allows for faster page load time, faster parsing and more complete indexing of your web pages

Remove Anything You Don’t Need

  • Whitespace is the space between your coding. Removing unneeded whitespace can greatly reduce your page load time by taking off extra bytes. 
  • Stand back and take a critical look at your website, you may see a few special effects that can be omitted for faster load time

Tools to test your website load time:

PageSpeed - This is a free Firefox/Firebug added on to evaluate the performance of web pages and offer suggestions on how to improve them.

The Pingdom - The Pingdom loads a complete HTML including all objects. It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser and reports the total loading time and the number of objects on the page. The results can be sorted by useful metrics such as load order, load time and file size.

WebPagetest.org - This tool is based on the Internet Explorer specific, AOL developed tool page test.  The online version offers the ability to choose a test location and more advanced settings, such as repeat testing for more reliable data.

WebSiteOptimizers.com- WebSiteOptimizers produces a basic, but useful page objects report with a particular focus on bandwidth saving through compression. The report also gives warnings on image size, scripts and CSS.

Google Webmaster Tools - These tools are extremely basic, but the crawl stats section can give you a good feel for your website’s overall performance.

References:

[1] How a Slow Website Impacts Your Visitors and Sales.” peer1 hosting. http://www.peer1.com/hosting/how-slow-websites-impact-visitors-and-sales.php

[2] Matthew Kammerer. June 30, 2009. “Keep Users Updated During Long Load Times.” UX Booth. 2008-2010, http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/keep-users-updated-during-long-load-times/

[3] Richard Gilmore. November 10, 2009. “Google Caffeine Going Live!” Search Engine Journal. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-caffeine-going-live/14596/

[4] Erick Schonfeld. December 28, 2009. “Google Is About To Get Caffeinated With A Faster Search Index.” Tech Crunch.  http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/28/google-caffeine-faster-search-index/?utm_source=cheekycheezy&utm_medium=pingfm&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch)

[5] “Formatting Tips to Speed up Your Website.” WebWeaver. 1998-2010, http://www.webweaver.nu/html-tips/load-time.shtml

[6] “Formatting Tips to Speed up Your Website.” WebWeaver. 1998-2010, http://www.webweaver.nu/html-tips/load-time.shtml

[7] Featured, Tech. February 11, 2009. “10 Free Tools to Check Website Loading Time.” Technically Personal. http://techpp.com/2009/02/11/10-free-tools-check-website-loading-time/

[8] “Pingdom Tools – Full page test.” Tools. 2009. http://tools.pingdom.com/

 

 

 

Free SEM Analysis
Sign Up