The Hard Truth About Website Speed

The time it takes for a page to load is an important part of any user experience. However there are times when you might choose to sacrifice load times in order to accommodate a better aesthetic design, new functionality or add more content to web pages. Unfortunately, website visitors care more about page loading times than an epic user experience. Also, website load times are becoming even more important when it comes to search engine rankings and mobile usage. Mobile visitors expect websites to load instantly, while using the slower speeds of mobile networks.

THE HARD FACTS:

  • Nearly half of users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less
  • Additionally, they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds
  • 79% of users who have trouble with performance say they won’t return
  • 44% of users would tell a friend if they had a poor experience

Site Analysis Tools

Are you interested in finding out how long it takes for your website to load? There are several free tools available. These tools report the number of requests, file sizes, and server response speed of your pages. Some even provide suggestions on how to improve your load times.

Ensuring fast load times

At Wrecking Ball, we go out of our way to ensure the platforms we build for our clients are optimized for fast load times. Our hosted content is delivered through Amazon’s high-speed AWS Cloud Hosting. Our CSS is optimized by the leading preprocessor, Sass. In the backend, such features as gzip compression and caching are enabled. Those are just some of our many practices for bringing down the loading time of our websites and applications.

Further reading

Published by: Carl Bolanos in Development
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