Are you experiencing high bounce rates, low conversion rates, and other undesirable website metrics? While there are a multitude of different reasons as to why your site isn’t performing, one of the most overlooked reasons is site and page load speed.
First, let’s get the terminology down.
In Google Analytics, go to “Behavior” on the left menu and click “Site Speed.”
To see site speed: Choose the first option “Overview.” From this page, you can see the average page load time, average server connection time, and other metrics on a broad scale. You can break this view down by browser, country, and page. Keep in mind, this report just shows averages, but what’s cool about this is you can view different time periods. By doing that, you can infer what changes caused slowdowns in the site.
In this view, you are able to see how each individual page loads. This report shows how the speed compares to your site’s average load speed, and you can even break it down by load time in seconds, bounce rate, page views, and more.
As for site speed tools, Google has PageSpeed Insights, which gives a very vivid diagnosis on how long it takes for the first contentful paint to load, the first meaningful paint, and other speed data. It provides screenshots from the initial load and also provides very actionable opportunities based on the insights from the test.
Now you’re probably wondering what a good speed to have is… however, every site is different. Obviously a simple single page site is going to load a lot quicker than a robust site full of animations, scrollytelling effects, and high quality retina visuals. It also depends on the server fetching the data, and other factors that you can’t actually see as a user. So if we’re talking about a good user experience, all excuses aside, anything longer than 3 seconds is too long – Google said so. And that’s still about 2.5 seconds too long, as Google also says users only want to wait about the length of a literal blink of the eye… 400 milliseconds. That’s asking a lot, though.
- Remove old and unused code, themes, databases, apps and anything else that’s cluttering the backend of the site;
- Optimize site wide assets, like your logo, items that appear in the footer, badges, etc.;
- Reduce the amount of http/s requests, as the more files there are, the more requests are run and the longer the load takes;
- Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files, because like I said, the less code the better.
Page speed is a little more fun (well… fun for me). You’re going to have to do some digging to figure out what needs to be optimized. Start by going to that “Page Timings” report in Google Analytics. Ask yourself these questions:
- What pages are the slowest? How slow?
- What pages have the highest bounce rates? And the lowest bounce rates?
- If bounce rates are high (at Electric Enijn, we like to see bounce rates under 40%), but the time spent on the page is also high – what’s keeping users on the page? Could that be slowing down the page?
