According to several studies from Kissmetrics and Linkedin the average person will abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load on their mobile device. They state that Google recommends website load times of one second or less on mobile devices.

What is the reason your website might be loading slower than other websites?

Why does a small site with less information load slower than a larger site with more information?

To understand, you must understand the critical rendering path. Google defines the critical path as the “code and resources required to render the initial view of a web page”.  A webpage is rendered when it can be seen by a user.  The rendering path of your content can be optimized and if you haven’t done it yet, it is something you needed to do yesterday.

Some of the common problems that can slow down your website’s load time are:

  • Uncompressed images / less optimal image formats
  • Unnecessary content
  • Web hosting configuration
  • Uncompressed web pages
  • Bulky code

I decided to play out a scenario. Let’s say I am going to Portland and I love seafood. I did a google search for “Seafood restaurants in Portland Oregon”. The first restaurants website I clicked on was Jake’s famous Crawfish  with a load time of 5.79 seconds. This took so long I closed it and went to the next on the list. The next on the list was Ring Side Fish House  Load time 3.66’s. It loaded faster and it was easy to get to the reservation page. So it doesn’t matter how famous Jakes Crawfish is, they just lost my business to a competitor.

Back in June Google announced that mobile search engine ranking will be directly impacted by the back end performance of your mobile website. This back end includes application and database servers, the network connection of the web servers, and the use of CDN’s (Content Delivery Network – see end for definition). Another aspect all website owners should research is ways to improve their Time to First Byte (TTFB); the measurement of a webserver or other network resources. You can use a free tool like ByteCheck.com to check your site and a few of your competitors.

Because you are trying to appease Google, use their free PageSpeed Insights tool for mobile and desktop issues. Another couple of great free tools are DareBoost.com and Tools.Pingdom.com which will give you a performance grade, Load time and Page size.

If you want to succeed in this new hand held device market, your web site’s bottom line depends on speed and responsiveness.

If you need help optimizing your website’s speed or simply implementing the recommendations from the above tools please contact us for a no obligation, free consultation.

*Content Delivery Network (CDN): content delivery network is a large distributed system of servers deployed at multiple data centers across the internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high ability and high performance.