Improve Your Website Speed to Drive More Conversions

Think about it. What would your first impression be about a website that is slow and takes forever to load. The website speed is the most crucial aspect for any business with digital presence. Sure, you know that better and hence you’re here to look for ways on how to improve website speed. 

Website performance not only impacts traffic and revenue but is also a reflection of your brand.  A slow website that frustrates users will create a negative brand image.

And you don’t want that. 

About 40% of users will leave a site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. Besides, page speed is a significant factor when it comes to ranking on SERP.  High-performing websites result in flawless user experience increasing engagement and converting more leads.

So, if you are one of those struggling to make your site perform faster or someone who’s using Sitecore but your page load speed is pretty low then look no further. Read on to know how to speed up your site. 

How to Improve Your Website Performance?

The performance of a website can be measured in multiple categories, which include how quickly (time) your site loads and render in a web browser and how fast it is ready to respond to a user’s interactions. While analyzing website performance, we need to consider two key areas:

• Reducing overall load time: How long does the website take to load on a user’s device? This tends to be affected by the number and the size of files, and the data transfer speed. A general strategy is to make your files as small as possible and reduce the number of HTTP requests to make files available sooner.

• Making the site usable as soon as possible: How soon is your website ready to interact, so that the users can navigate to primary areas of the website such as the Language Selector, Navigation Menu, Slider, etc. Any other assets can continue to load in the background while the user gets on with primary tasks.
  
  

  Sometimes the content is loaded only when the user specifically asks for it to be loaded, like ‘show more options’. This is called lazy loading in website terminology. The measurement of how long it takes the site to get to a usable start after it has started loading is called time to interact.

Website Performance and Technology

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is another factor that commands the reachability and success of your site. In an attempt to improve user experience on the web, Google included page speed in its SEO ranking analysis in 2010.

In 2020, Google announced that three new user experience metrics known as ‘Core Web Vitals’ would judge the ranking factor as part of the Google Page Experience. Google bots perform tests on a website based on these metrics, among others, to determine website speed.

Google SEO ranking is determined by the CrUX data. The CrUX report contains a glimpse of the data that Google’s search algorithm has access to. When you look at CrUX, you get a small look at how the ranking algorithm views a site.

How to Test Website Performance?

Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool

PageSpeed Insights scores are calculated via Lighthouse, Google’s open-source, automated tool for improving the overall quality of web pages. This platform can evaluate all sorts of factors, including performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and more.

Once you enter your site’s URL to analyze the Website performance, you will get PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices. The tool will then provide suggestions on how the page may be altered in order to improve the score.

Core Web Vitals   

Technical Improvement areas

Waterfall Charts

Another important tool in improving website performance is the waterfall chart. It shows exactly how long users have to wait for each component of your site to load. The waterfall tool will become your go-to tool for benchmarking speed before and after to track website performance improvements.

Waterfall Charts of all requests for the page

Webpage Test is a free, configurable tool that can generate waterfall charts for any site you’re working on.
The bright green line near 1 second is the time needed to Start Render. The yellow line, at 3 seconds, is time to DOM Interactive. Finally, the dark blue line, just before 4 seconds, is time to Document Complete.

Further to the above tools, there are certain web performance metrics you need to consider for website speed optimization. Each of these three metrics has a different effect on user experience.

• Start render is the perceived speed and is tied to how long a user feels it takes a site to load. A quick start render satisfies users’ expectations that a site loads in 2 seconds or less. It is an important yardstick since it marks the first asset displayed to the user irrespective of its size.


• DOM interactive is arguably the most important metric. If a user can interact with what they’re looking for before the page loads completely, it will feel complete to them.


• Document Complete is the point at which the browser has rendered all static content, including content a user might not even know about. This is when it is safe to assume that the user sees the site as was intended.

Wrapping Up

The read above makes it clear just how important page speed is and the direct impact it has on your business. Whether it is enhancing core web vitals score, better SEO implementation, or faster loading time, multiple factors go into making your site run faster and increase its efficiency.

If you need help with optimizing your page speed or want to know more about how website speed optimization works then you should contact us.

Our team of experts will provide you with robust and best performance engineering solutions that suit your business vision and goals. Moreover, our accelerators, libraries, and IPs can help you reach Google standards in a span of a few days.