Here’s the conundrum: internet users love pretty things, so you load lots of pretty things onto your web pages. More internet users flock to your site, but pretty things take time to load. Internet users don’t love long download times, so you lose users. How do you get around this?
Slow page download times are the curse of the modern internet. Studies repeatedly show that slow page load times seriously harm sites. It’s been discovered that users wait only two to three seconds before giving up on a page. In looking at your page load times, it’s important to realise that seconds can seem awfully long when you’re waiting, and not make allowances. Your users won’t.
Don’t make the supreme sacrifice
Users lap up high-quality images, personalized content and multimedia. At the same time, they hate the drag that those elements can create. The solution, for most websites, is to cut out these load-heavy elements completely. This leads you back to static pages with little visually interesting content, which means that your traffic stats might not be soaring as high as you want them to be.
Cutting out all of the load-heavy elements of a page is the ultimate sacrifice. It’s also an unnecessary one. Some of your page features should be able to be trimmed, and your search engine optimisation consultant can help with this. You can discuss this issue with us at SEO Consult. These kinds of trims are a standard part of an initial optimisation, and you may be surprised how effective they are.
Perception is the key
It’s important to note that it’s only the perceived download time that affects site traffic. If you manage to find a way to distract your users while the page is being loaded, you’ve probably found the solution. Finding a way that effectively distracts without adding too much more time to the download, however, can be difficult.
Many sites have clued into this aspect of page load times, but have inserted a distraction that takes five seconds to load on its own. This is not an effective Strategy. Users are likely to be even more annoyed if what they’ve been waiting for turns out to be a monkey and a grinder organ.
Another way to go is humorous honesty. Letting your users know that the page is going to take a couple of seconds to load, offering an explanation and tickling their sense of humour can keep them on side during the load. Anything that entertains is also good.
Examine your technologies
Part of the problem with page load times is off-screen. Your server contributes to your Page Load Times. If there’s something wrong at the server end, no amount of page trimming is going to help. Also impacting on your page load times are things like traffic on the network and the distance of your site users from the physical location of your data centre. If trimming pages isn’t working, it can be a good idea to look at the more technical side of your site.
Related posts:
- Page load time is all perception
- Is Your Load Time Sinking Your SEO Ranking?
- Page Load Times And SEO
- The 10-Second Usability Test
- Does Server Location Affect SEO?
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The Google Page Speed Add-On for Firefox with Firebug, is an excellent tool for optimising page load speeds, whilst being user friendly.
Typical page load speed tasks include: optimise image size/type, use gzip, combine and externalise all css and javascript, combine images where possible to reduce http requests, get dedicated hosting, etc., etc.