That is right. You will have fewer page views in those one-to-two seconds, decrease customer satisfaction, and see fewer conversions.
Today’s consumers have high demands that they expect, especially regarding the speed at which they browse the web.
They want an unhindered user experience to quickly and effortlessly find what they are looking for on the web.
Fast loading websites have become a requirement to remain competitive and not lose visitors to your website.
Before making changes to your website, you will need to measure its performance first. Several tools on the market will enable you to test and measure your homepage speed, including:
This article will use the GTmetrix tool and The Dental Marketing Guy website to measure, analyze, and recommend improvements.
You can either use the public version of GTmetrix or register for a free account. The public version always uses the same configurations.
With a free account, you can change the conditions, such as the testing location and connection speed, for a more accurate result based on your target audience.
Start by heading over to the GTmetrix home page, entering the URL of the site you want to test, and clicking Analyze.
GTmetrix generates a performance report with Web Vitals and a Grade when you run your speed test. The GTmetrix grade is derived from two sources:
Web Vitals, introduced by Google in 2020, is a standardized set of user experience and web performance metrics.
GTmetrix focuses primarily on the following Web Vitals metrics:
In our example, using Dental Marketing Guy, the GTmetrix speed test results are:
Now let us see where we can make improvements on specific metrics. Boost Your site speed with these five ways to cut the time it takes your home page to load.
When visitors land on your home page, their browser requests to access your site’s content. However, if your website has excessive JS, CSS, HTML, and other assets, the page load is reduced because they take longer to process.
Minification refers to stripping out unnecessary characters in your site’s code and does not change its functionality.
Examples include removing unnecessary line breaks, white spaces, comments, redundant code, and characters.
WordPress (WP) users can use a plugin such as W3 Total Cache to minify JS files, CSS, HTML, and other assets.
Non-WP users can use online tools to minify codes.
Assets refer to elements such as images and favicons. Naturally, you want to make them as small as possible and compress them without sacrificing quality.
Minification increases page speed by making the transfers smaller and more efficient. In addition, GTmetrix triggers structure audits after scanning your site.
The audits are based on Google’s best practices for optimal front-end website performance. They are assessed and ranked according to their impact on your performance and how well you adhere to the best practice standards.
Even though the structure audits do not directly affect your Performance score, they can improve overall page loading time.
Click on the down-arrow to open the specific suggestions for each element. GTmetrix suggests focusing on this top issue section first as they have the most considerable impact on page speed and performance.
Each time a page on your website redirects somewhere else, it prolongs the HTTP request and response process while reducing loading times.
There will be some situations where a redirect is necessary. However, remove any unnecessary redirects on your site to increase the speed at which pages are loaded.
Dental Marketing Guy has no issues with too many page redirects.
WP users can use a plugin to reduce redirects. However, GTmetrix recommends redirecting necessary URLs on the server-side because they are cacheable, fast, and universally implemented.
Image source GTmetrix
Browser caching can significantly improve page load times by asking website visitors to save and reuse your site’s files.
It works by enabling browsers to store various information and files, such as JS files, stylesheets, and images, so that the entire page does not need to reload every time the same visitor lands on it.
In our example, the impact is low under the structure tab for cache policy. However, GTmetrix still offers recommendations for improvement.
GTmetrix identifies a resource as cacheable if it meets all of the following criteria:
GTmetrix will flag all the static resources that need attention and improvement when you are not leveraging browser caching.
Click Audit to see the list of resources with transfer size and the cache time-to-live (TTL).
When your site does not have the correct HTTP cache headers on the server, site speed is affected and slows down.
Many site owners struggle with leveraging browser caching, especially when it occurs on resources you do not control.
For example, if your Audit shows a third-party ad network as a cache issue, you can do nothing as it is not a resource you control.
WP users can use one of the many powerful caching plugins, such as WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, and W3 Total Cache, to optimize and create lightning speed page loading times.
TTFB is the total amount of time browsers need to wait before receiving the first byte of a response request.
It refers to how long it takes for a page to start loading. The metric is made up of the Redirection Duration + Connection Duration + Backend Duration and is a key indicator of web performance.
A slow TTFB might result in website visitors only seeing a blank page while the browser waits for your server to respond.
Requests for your web page from users are sent to the server. The server, in turn, generates an appropriate response and sends back your page resources to the user.
Below are a few ways to improve TTFB:
Using the Waterfall tab in GTmetrix, TTFB is measured from the test’s start until right before receiving the page requested.
One of the best ways to reduce TTFB is to enable browser caching.
A CDN is a network of servers with nodes located in different regions. The servers are spread around the world.
The benefit of using a CDN is to reduce load times by caching your page’s static content, such as JS files, images, and CSS.
When a visitor lands on your site, resources are served from the cache of the closest CDN node. This is instead of loading resources from your original server.
Leveraging a CDN will improve page loading speed by hosting and delivering copies of your website’s static content from servers located in various locations across the globe.
It works by reducing the distance user-requested data has to travel between your servers and the visitors’ browsers.
Image source GTmetrix
GTmetrix will look at page request response headers, identify those not served from a known CDN, and trigger an audit.
While CDNs can significantly improve website performance across different locations, they are not essential to your website’s functionality.
Whether or not to use a CDN will depend upon your performance goals and the location of your target audience.
We cannot overstate how critical site speed is to success. You must regularly monitor page loading speed and make improvements where necessary.
As we have shown above, several factors affect home page loading speeds. Therefore, using a tool to help identify issues and provide valuable suggestions on areas to optimize performance is invaluable.
Be sure to look beyond just the scores. Instead, do a deep dive into the specific aspects of your website’s performance that have the most impact on your page load times.
Do not forget that every second it takes your web page to load significantly increases visitors’ chances to leave.
For help with your dental website design let’s talk!
