Most of these podcast episodes come about because sometime in the week prior, something has come up for me to spawn discussing it for everyone. This week I discovered a few client websites were still adding large images to the article posts even though they were taught to optimize them in a way that would be faster to their visitors.

What is page load time and why is it important?

Load time is the length of time it takes a web page to be downloaded from the hosting server and displayed onto the requesting web browser. It’s the duration between clicking the link and displaying the entire content in your browser.

That number matters because we expect websites to be fast. When pages take longer than expected to load, it negatively impacts our user experience. Google and other search engines factor in loading time into how they rank your website in their search results. Faster sites appear in their search results before slower loading ones.

So, let’s look at some ways to keep our websites loading faster.

1. Optimizing Your Images

The biggest culprit for slow sites is a large volume of unoptimized images. Full-sized images can consume a lot of bandwidth while loading. So, take time to resize your images before you upload them to any website.

The image format that you save in can significantly determine the file size. PNG files are typically 2-4 times larger in file size than JPG files of the same dimensions.

So, it’s always best to fully optimize your images before uploading them anywhere online.

2. Decrease Displaying Offsite RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are popular because they contain content that you may not have on your website. We highly discourage the display of off-site RSS feeds because they take visitors away from your content and sponsor advertising.

Displaying an external RSS feed means that the web page has to load that content from where it’s getting the information from. If the server sending the information is slow, for any reason, it could slow the completion of your page load.

3. Limit/Stop the Use of Sliders/Carousels

Sliders and carousels can bring along with it lots of extra code in the background that is needed for them to work properly. Expect horrible load times if you are using a slider with a visual type of admin that allows you to have slides animate in from all directions and each slide has multiple animated elements.

Sliders do not convert well, so consider replacing them with one or multiple static calls to action.

4. Minimize the number of ads on your pages.

We know that large amounts of images that are not optimized are the biggest culprit to slow websites, so it’s only fitting that we try to reduce the number of total images including ads. Examine other ways to add value to your clients like offering pages or feature sponsorships.

Conclusion:

The biggest takeaway from today is to optimize your images. If you have someone on your team that isn’t jumping on board with this, then emphasize the importance. There are several free converter websites and even image editing sites like the https://www.pixlr.com editor that can be used to properly size and optimize every image that gets uploaded.

Visitors return to faster websites and those websites get more shares and clicks. That’s a better value to the advertisers that give you money to be included there. So, a faster website will have an impact on your bottom line.