web performance
Key indicators you should track to speed up your website
What if load time was a website's number one priority? Here's some of the key things to watch if you want to speed up your website.
Camille Adamczyk April 14, 2021 · 2 min read
Internet users aren't exactly known for their patience, and they will quickly leave a web page if it doesn't load fast enough. So what if load time was a website's number one priority? Here's some of the key things to watch if you want to speed up your website.
Page load time: a key factor for SEO and business performance
The more time it takes for something to happen on a web page, the more likely a visitor is to abandon it. If a web page takes more than 3 seconds to load, visitors start to leave in droves. And this applies even more to mobile users. According to Google, half of all web users leave a website if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load. In the eyes of the Silicon Valley giant, website speed is a major SEO ranking factor and far more important than either website design or ease of navigation. Every visitor that abandons a page early means lost conversions and purchases, and customer satisfaction dives. And these can have a big impact on your business! Website performance is so important to Google that it’s central to its Core Web Vitals measuring user experience (UX). They are defined by three metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
While Core Web Vitals are essential to ensuring great user experience, improving website speed also requires working on four additional Google KPIs. These indicators are important when it comes to optimizing load times and if you want to improve your website's ranking in search engines.
Page speed: the first byte
Your web server has an impact on your website speed. The Time to first byte (TTFB) measures the time it takes for the first byte of your website to load from your server to a web browser and determines how quickly a page is displayed.
In addition to having a positive effect on user experience, having a great TTFB makes it easier for Google robots to analyse your pages. And that ultimately has a positive effect on the SEO of your website.
The importance of perceived load speed
The second indicator is Start render time. It’s the user’s perception of what is happening on the web page. It lets them quickly detect that a page is loading without anything much being displayed at first.
However, they can sense that the other page elements will begin to load very shortly. And that plays an important role in getting them to stay on the page.
The speed at which images load can have a huge effect on this KPI.
Page display, an indicator you can optimize
The Speed Index (SI) of a website measures the time it takes to successfully load all of the page elements that appear above the fold (i.e. that first appear in a browser's viewport).
The speed at which images and photos load can obviously have a significant impact both on UX and SEO.
Visitors should be able to take action quickly
A web page that loads incredibly fast is great. But a page that lets a visitor quickly take action is even better! Time to Interactive (TTI) measures the time it takes for a page to become interactive, i.e. when the first buttons and navigation areas are active.
Images can have a huge impact. Especially when an image is associated with a product that could result in a purchase!
If you want to improve the speed of your website, every millisecond counts. TwicPics enables you to significantly improve the last three of these indicators by optimizing the way images are delivered to your web pages. This ensures both fast page load times and the best possible visual quality for your website.
Don't forget that images typically represent two-thirds of a page's overall load.
So how about starting to optimize the delivery time of your images?