Improving our website load time
If we believe the statistics, 50% of users will leave a website that does not load in 5 seconds. I don’t believe too much in statistics, but it’s what I do: reading my Twitter timeline I find lot of links that I should take a look. As I usually do from the phone, I depend on my 3G and I’ve to take care about not exceed my data limit.
If there is anything hotter than Responsive Design are social networks, 60% of Twitter users access via mobile and 157 million people use Facebook ONLY from their mobile. I’m sure that we always try to move our website in social networks, we share links to our latest blog post on Twitter and we publish the latest product on Facebook. These people go to your website from a mobile device.
Mobile browsing is the one that gives problems with the connection speed, considering that mobile phones communicate with signal towers via a radio chips, with three states: active, waiting and free. When you switch from free to active takes 1-2 seconds to activate and start receiving / sending signals. If we said that the average user leaves the site in 5 seconds, you have 3 seconds to load your website.
In 2008, when we did not live so stressed and could expect a website to load, Aberdeen Group conducted a study to estimate the impact of load time by more than 160 organizations with average annual earnings of $3 billion. A 7% conversion loss for a second load time: $2,500.00 lost annually for those making $100,000 a day.
The problem here is that even reducing our website weight to 20k there are still factors that are not only the weight of the web.
Reduce the load time requires common sense:
Do not upload scripts that you’re not going to use: How often do we include jQuery in the header and load on all pages? including those who do not use any plugins. Not only we do, many CMS make 5 to 10 Scripts requests that do not use: do not let them upload content useless.
Optimize images: With the variety of sizes and devices we have today, loading the same image for all is unforgivable. Why not upload one for each target? A cell phone requires a small image, a tablet a larger, desktop may require another version of the image and let’s not forget retina devices. If this makes you a mess, maybe a script called PictureFill will help.
Optimize your content: Minimize HTTP Request that are basically downloading files needed to render the page, this is the key to reduce load times. Obviously begins by simplifying the design, as we know the design and optimization is well designed page is a quick page, among other things. There are several techniques you can use to reduce calls to the server, such as sprites, mergin Scripts and CSS, etc …
Hope that with this we can start building a faster web and accessible to all of those who use 3G daily.
