Whenever we meet with clients, a few things are always a safe bet. It should look clean and fresh, probably a bit like Apple. It should also be intuitive, also a bit like Apple. Come to think of it, most people just want to be Apple. As the person making your site though, I can report that one factor is often overlooked: speed. We’ll look deeper into why speed matters so much, but the TL;DR version is that you want speed because Google says so.

Google wants speed because it wants your users happy

When it comes to making Google happy, it’s a two-sided coin. On one side, their algorithm is complicated and never 100% known, but on the other, it can mostly be broken down to one simple rule: “make the user happy.”

For that reason, the things that Google cares about are that mobile users are having a good experience, colour-blind users are having a good experience, and people who need quick answers are having a good experience. And what creates a great experience that few will ever complain about? Speed.

As everyone pivoted to spending more time on mobile internet, connection speeds dropped, as did happiness with bloated (yet often beautiful) websites. Around 2010, Google declared that they were going to war with slow websites. If you didn’t adapt, the algorithm would leave you behind.

By 2020, Google had introduced Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics focusing on key aspects of user experience: loading (Largest Contentful Paint), interactivity (First Input Delay), and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift). These metrics are now crucial indicators of a site’s performance and significantly influence its ranking on Google’s search engine results pages. Ensuring your website meets these standards not only boosts your ranking but also enhances overall user satisfaction.

People do not have the time

While Google ranking is top of mind for most people, the simple act of having a page load too slowly is enough to lose customers even after you’ve managed to get their eyes.

Statistics on when people leave a website that’s moving too slowly tend to strike fear into the hearts of business and web people alike. Even though we behave exactly the same as everybody else, seeing the raw numbers can be jarring. According to research by Google, as page load time goes from one second to ten seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor leaving increases by 123%. Moreover, studies show that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than three seconds to load.

Beyond simple matters of frustration, a fast-loading speed is also psychologically pleasing to people. It means you and your business are a finely tuned machine that knows what’s up. Don’t believe me? Pay attention to that knot in your stomach the next time you go to purchase something from a site and it takes three seconds to load your cart, causing you to break out into a flop sweat.

So where do we begin with speed?

Images

There are many ways to have a fast site, or speed up your existing one. The main culprit on most of the slow sites we encounter is images. Not that images are a problem, but it’s when people upload images to their sites without adjusting them first.

As internet speeds have gotten better and phones have become more powerful, your average image these days is monstrously large compared to the overall recommended size of a single web page. To give you an idea, a standard photo taken on a two-year-old iPhone is about 2.5 MB, while the recommended size of an entire page according to Google is 500 KB. If we added a single image from an iPhone to a webpage without adjusting it first, it would be—on its own—five times bigger than the recommended size for the entire page.

Your friendly neighbourhood web professional can help with tools that will automatically shrink your images on upload if you’d like, or you can use tools such as TinyPNG or Photoshop to adjust them before they hit your site.

Caching

Caching is like the barista that knows your order and has it ready for you before you even walk through the door. It keeps a lot of your site in memory and serves it up immediately to users. Again, this is a tool your web person can help with, or you can find handy plugins online to help you.

One word of caution though, sometimes caching works a little too well. If you ever find yourself scratching your head over changes that aren’t showing, 75% of the time it’s caching every time.

Hosting

The siren call of cheap hosting is a strong one. I’ve heard it myself, and as somebody who’s made the mistake too many times to admit, I recommend you stay strong against its charms. While the difference between a cheap host and a pricey host can be a few hundred dollars a year, cheap hosting has a way of making you pay in other ways (sanity, life meaning, and ability to sleep among them).

A good (read: pricey) host will focus on things like speed and stability, which, if you’re doing anything remotely serious, will matter above all else. I know. I hate paying them too. It’s a bad feeling you just have to move on from.

Good Code

It wouldn’t be a blog post without some base-level pandering, would it? As the world of building websites changes to a more user-friendly landscape, we have themes that allow people to make more and more complicated layouts. While this is outstanding, many of the themes can end up being a giant Swiss Army knife of code. This versatility, unfortunately, can come at the cost of size and speed.

That’s not to say you can’t benefit from this brave new world, it’s just that it needs to be set up properly with the strong tools and practices.

How do I know if my site is slow?

A common tool used in the industry is a website known as GTMetrix. It will do a base-level scan of a page on your site and report back with a score alongside a laundry list of potential fixes. As you work your way through the list, you can run new scans to see the score climb ever higher.

Conclusion

While the importance of speed can at times be a frustrating bummer to those of us making the sites, the end goal is noble: we want our users to have a good time on our sites. With a touch of forethought and a little help, building a site that meets speed standards is not an out-of-reach goal for anybody.

Get your images small, use a great host that will help with caching, reach out for help when needed, and you’ll be all set. And of course, if you find yourself lost and without help, we’re always a click away.