Importance of Website Speed
Website loading speeds have become ever more important these days, with the uptake of broadband nearing 70% of households in the UK, speed is not something that you can skimp on.
There seems, however, to be some confusion and misunderstanding as to what constitutes website speed and how to improve it, and some unscrupulous companies have been taking advantage of this confusion to sell products and services that are based on either outright lies or at the very least claims that would make trading standards have a heart attack.
Why Speed Is So Important
Generally speaking, with a few exceptions, a user’s perception of a website is based on three factors:
- How easy it is to use and find the content that they are looking for
- The design of the website and whether it creates any kind of emotional response
- The speed that the website loads in
The first two factors are out of the scope of this post, however we will look at the last one in depth. Websites need to load quickly because otherwise users get bored and go elsewhere. It’s as simple as that. A website that responds quickly to user input keeps users on your site, whereas one that takes more than a few seconds to respond to a user’s actions falls flat on it’s face.
Interestingly speed was one of the driving factors behind people’s transition from MySpace to Facebook as their primary social networking website. MySpace was slow, buggy and badly designed. But most of all it was slow. Facebook offered a slicker, quicker way of doing things, and users loved it.
How To Improve Website Speed
There are numerous ways of increasing the speed of a website. The first is by decreasing the size of pages, which seems like a pretty logical step to take. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to decrease the amount of content that you are showing users, it has more to do with writing intelligent code that minimises the amount of code on a page and maximises the content/code ratio as much as possible. Incidentally this also helps with search engine optimisation.
The second way of increasing the speed of a website is to minimise the amount of components that are being loaded when a visitor goes to view a page. Think about it – if you have a web page with 5 images on it, you are having to make 6 “requests” for data from the server (1 for the web page and 1 for each image). Each request that is sent to the server comes with it’s own overheads and when you have a lot of content loading on a page these overheads quickly add up. The trick here is to a) minimise the amount of requests that you are sending to the server and b) by minimising the overheads associated with each request. We’ll talk about the former angle first and cover the second a little later on in this post.
Minimising the amount of requests that you have to make to a server in order to display a web page is generally as simple as combining images on a page into sprites and ensuring all of your JavaScript and CSS files are combined into two files instead of 6 or 7.
The other aspect to look at speeding up is the overheads associated with each request made to the server. To fully understand how this might work, we have to quickly delve into the lala land of how the Internet actually works. Essentially it’s a big network of cables, connected at hubs by computers. The more hubs and computers that a request for information has to go through, the longer it’ll take to get the information back to you. It’s essentially a bit like chinese whispers, although (unless you’re really unlucky) what goes in at one end tends to be what comes out at the other.
To minimise the amount of latency (the amount of time it takes for a request to come back) you need to take into account geographical location – this is essentially why we have servers in the London Docklands area as opposed to in America where they are substantially cheaper due to lower energy costs. Although the difference between a server in the UK and a server in the US in terms of additional ping times may be as low as 250 milliseconds, these milliseconds quickly add up when you are doing multiple requests per web page.
Take the following example: if a web page contains 6 items that need to be requested from the server, and the latency is 300ms (typical for a server in the US when you are in Europe) then your overheads are going to come in at a hefty 1800ms – that’s 1.8 seconds that you’re sitting there, just waiting for data to come flowing back to you. If you have servers in the UK with a good connection to the BT backbone (hint hint, we do have exactly that), you’re looking at ping times of around 35ms, slashing the overall latency overhead of the same web page’s loading time to around 210ms – a fifth of a second.
By using fast, locally based servers, you can ensure that your latency overheads are low, and by minimising your requests per page, you can cut the amount of times you are multiplying your latency overhead per page load, leading to a much increased page speed.
If your customers are spread over a wide geographical area or are indeed global, the easiest way of ensuring fast servers for them all is to use something called a content delivery network, which lets you have multiple servers around the world and then automatically direct users to the one that’s fastest for them from their location.
The Effect on Search Engine Optimisation
Google have recently confirmed that website speed does have a very small impact on search results (“approximately 1% of search results”) – this is totally understandable, because Google are looking for their users to have a positive experience when clicking on their search results, and a web page that takes 10 seconds to load is the exact opposite of a positive experience. Let me quickly repeat that: Speed has a minor impact on search results, but is important for retaining visitors that click on your links.
What About The Lies?
At the beginning of this post I briefly touched on the fact that certain companies have been exploiting Google’s admission that they do take speed into account when building search results. I recently had a phone call from a company called UK Fast, who I have come across before by way of their ludicrous marketing material which bears no resemblance to the facts about website speed. Because of the uncertainty about what website speed does for your business, they have taken the advantage of this to market so-called “SEO Servers” – essentially servers that they say will get you higher search results. This on it’s own is a complete fabrication, as there are hundreds of factors more important than just purely the speed at which a website loads to gain ground in the search engine results pages. While I agree with them that a faster, geographically relevantly located server will serve your users better, it will not automatically triple the amount of business you get from your website overnight. There’s a very good article by Kay Dinsdale about the misleading marketing practices favoured by UK Fast which is well worth a read if you’re interested.
In Summary
To sum all of the above up – the speed of a website is important. Very important in fact, and it’s not even that hard to achieve decent loading speeds, however be aware that there are companies out there who will sell you something on claims that are too good to be true and are in fact an outright lie. If you’d like to have a chat about what we can do to increase the speed of your website, feel free to give us a call – we’ll always give out free advice and honest opinions. We won’t offer to triple the amount of revenue you’re making online overnight, but we can give you realistic targets and affordable solutions to website speed – something that is becoming increasingly important in what is becoming a very competitive market.
Photo by Irargerich