How and why you should increase page loading speed

Website loading speed is very important. If your site has slow loading speed it can drastically reduce the number of people willing to use your site. And it only takes a few seconds for you to loose a large chunk of users.

here are some facts illustrating this. 47% of users will exit a site if it loads in over two seconds or less. And 40% will abondon the page if it takes 3 or more seconds to load. And when you loose those users they are even less likely to return to your site due to dissatisfaction. 79% of customers in one survey said tthat they would not return to a site if it took too long to load. And of those 79%, 44% said that they tell their friends about the poor performance on the website. Here are some things you can do to speed up page loading.

1. Minimize the amount of HTTP requests

A large part of the loading time is taken up by HTTP requests. These requests consist of images, stylesheets and scripts. By minifying and combining files you can rudece file size and reduce the number of requests. It is better to have a single stylesheet then to have multiple stylesheets taking up HTTP requests.

2. Reuce the file size of your images

Finding the right balance between image quality and filesize is key. You can use image compression software to lower the filesize of an image.

3. Load things in the order in which the user uses them

when someone visits a blog there might be 10 or so images that need to be loaded. Since the user isn't going the see all the images in one page, because they have to scroll down to see more. It might be a good idea to load things based on browser scrolling.