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Website speed

How fast a website runs comes down to a handful of things:

  • the speed of the connection between the visitor and the hosting (the one factor the site owner cannot do anything about);
  • the speed of the hosting server itself;
  • the speed of the site’s CMS;
  • the “weight” of the pages, images, CSS and JavaScript files included;
  • how complicated the HTML/CSS/JS of those pages is;
  • whether the pages pull in code from third-party services.

All of which is quite involved, and the factors combine with each other in ways that add further wrinkles. The speed of a CMS, for instance, depends critically on the number and quality of the SQL queries it makes and on how fast the database on the hosting server answers them.

Caching is the usual remedy for the bottlenecks. It can make a site tens of times faster — while introducing complications of its own, the classic one being visitors served stale, cached information.

All the same: the first thing you as the site owner should be thinking about is simply how quickly the site loads for the people using it.

Why does site speed matter so much?

Google research published in September 2016, “The need for mobile speed: How mobile latency impacts publisher revenue”, found that:

  • 53% of visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load;
  • half of all users expect a page to load in under 2 seconds;
  • 46% of people say waiting for pages to load is what they dislike most about browsing on a phone;
  • sites that load in 5 seconds earn twice as much mobile ad revenue as sites that load in 19;
  • those same 5-second sites see 25% more ad views, and visitors stay on them 70% longer, than on sites that take 19 seconds.
Picture your site loading slowly and half of your visitors simply leaving. It is like running a taxi service at 30 km/h. There is no point to it.

Read the research on how speed affects marketing figures carefully and one thing stands out: the delays that do real commercial damage are measured in single seconds.

"[…] For e-commerce sites, a two-second slowdown in page load pushed abandonment up to 87%. That is considerably above the 67% average.

[…] and it is not enough to draw users in with a fast first page. Slow third-level pages raised abandonment from 67% to 80%."

Case Study: How a 2-Second Improvement in Page Load Time More Than Doubled Conversions

There is more. Speed is officially a Google ranking factor. A slow site is pushed down the results and has its content indexed less often — which means visitors not only leave it faster, they arrive at it less often in the first place.

What counts as fast enough?

No site is instantaneous. Time is always spent somewhere: the hosting server preparing the page, the data travelling to the visitor’s device, the browser rendering what it receives.

The research puts the critical threshold at 3 seconds. Under 2 seconds is the comfortable range — what most people quietly expect.

Those are the numbers worth aiming at.

How do I check my site’s speed?

Pinning down exactly what is holding a site back means looking at the hosting configuration, the CMS settings and the construction of the frontend — the HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Google Chrome has performance testing tools built in for the last of those, but that is a large subject and deserves an article of its own.

For a quick check, these online services will do: