Why Does My Website Load Slow?
Slow load times can sabotage your website’s chances of ranking well with search engines and generating valuable organic traffic. In fact, each fraction of a second that your pages take to load can significantly increase your website’s abandonment rates. People want to find information fast, and they know that they can probably find it faster elsewhere if your website is taking longer than expected. Higher bounce rates often mean lower conversion rates, which means your business profits can quickly get lost in the abyss of better optimized websites. The obvious answer is to speed up page speed on your website, but how do you do that?
GLASS™ is a content management system (CMS) that specializes in providing business websites with exactly the tools and resources they need to create fast and successful websites. In this blog, GLASS™ covers the importance of using Google Core Web Vitals to understand your website’s page speed opportunities and how to use this information to fix slow load times.
Published on May 20, 2022
How to Speed up Page Loading
How Do You Fix Slow Page Speed?
Monitoring Metrics
Even when you have page loading times in mind from the very beginning, you may still find yourself wondering why your pages are loading slower than anticipated. A great place to start is often by checking the page’s Core Web Vitals, which will let you know immediately if the page is meeting the page speed recommendations set by Google.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of the metrics that commonly contributes to slow load times. LCP is the measurement of the largest piece of content that appears above the fold on a page. When the LCP is too large, that piece of content can take a while to load, thus contributing to slow load times. Best practice is to make sure that your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) for each page falls below 2.5 seconds of loading time. In other words, when a user clicks on the page, it should take less than 2.5 seconds for the biggest piece of content above the fold to load.
Core Web Vitals will also let you know other important metrics for your pages, such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). All of these play a crucial role in understanding slow load times. Fixing opportunities in these areas can reduce loading times and improve your website’s overall user experience.
Optimizing Images
A good CMS content editor will usually take care of this for you, but you may need to learn how to optimize your own images if you don’t have the support of a CMS. Good practice is to reduce the size of your images as much as possible without sacrificing quality. If the page is 700px wide, for example, then adding an image that is 800px wide is usually superfluous and can negatively impact loading times.
Of course, images are a necessary part of creating a positive user experience on your website, but moderation is key. Using too many images or images that are too large can produce exactly the opposite effect of a good user experience.
Minifying Code
If you are managing a website without the use of a CMS, you will want to make sure that the code for every page is minified. Any unnecessary characters, line breaks, and whitespaces will add to the loading time for the page. Since most pages likely use CSS and Javascript, minifying code can have a worthwhile impact on loading times. Remember, every second counts.
Maximize Your Productivity with GLASS™
GLASS™ is an intuitive CMS that can set your website apart from the competition. We offer built-in, easy to use Core Web Vitals tracking to let you know exactly how well each page is performing. Managing a website and quickly creating scalable content is easy with a website builder like GLASS™.