So what is this website speed and why its important ?

In this short series of short Q&A I will try to sum up and use less jargon to explain the importance of website speed. To understand the website speed we will be using developer tools like https://pagespeed.web.dev/ .

There are other tools available like GTmetrix and others simply google page speed and you will see an ocean of different sites that offer just that 🙂

To measure website speed in this scenario I will be using https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and weblevelup.co.uk as an example to see how we performed and what can we do next to improve.

Speed Test result

Great to see that we scored in the high of 70+ for mobile. We always build websites mobile first and this is just one of reflections on our performance.

How ever its not perfect and we can see there is room for improvement. Resizing images and eliminating render-blocking resources.

Also just because your website scores say 40 or less it dose not mean its all bad. You need to know what purpose your website is serving and accept that you will never have a 100 score as there are factors that will prevent this score ever reached.

Main factors for high speed websites is a good reliable hosting service. When you choose one make sure it done right by you. A lot of hosting companies would just take your money put your site together with other sites that share the recourses and that will be it. Some times you get for what you pay for, if you pay for your hosting £10-£20 do not expect your website to spin fast, it usually means its shared recourses on lover end server.

The reason we try and make our websites fast its to allow customers experience to be as great as possible, from the first visit they come and see a soothe interaction with your website, no lag, no waiting – just works.

In the 2nd place its google crawler bots, will visit and update your content much more frequent means your new content will out there and gaining the ranks trough the search engine.

What to do if your website is slow ?

If your website is slow or you getting low score I would advice you to get in touch with who ever manages your website. If your website is only hosted and not managed we would be happy to run the test for you and give you free recommendation on your next steps.

What you can do your self if you have time and no money, there are great resources online simply check one of them that could potentially save you time and improve on website speed is plugins or software that will optimise this for you.

Also serving images next generation in WebP format will help, there are some great free plugins that could solve some of the problems you might have.

I would also invest time in researching on caching plugins this will help with some pages to be rendered as static pages and allow you to serve these from server faster to your customers.

Sum up and conclusion

Why its important for website to be fast – its for your customers, when they visit you – buy from you, use your services. It is in your interest to provide them with the fastest response or they will go some where else.

Customers are inpatient if things don’t work on your website the way they expect they will leave and go to your competition.

It is very important to have website speed monitored and optimised.

Get in touch ask us a question, or request a free website analysis, we would be happy to help you and advice you on your next steps.