What is Page Load Time & How to Improve It

Imagine you’re clicking on a website link to learn more about a product, service, or piece of information. You click the link and wait for the website to load. And wait. And wait some more.

Eventually, you’re sure the page is never going to load, and you decide that you simply don’t care to learn about that product, service, or piece of information anymore. You abandon the website and move on.

This is due to a slow page load time, a factor that can leave hundreds or even thousands of website visitors on the table, rather than pulling them into your website and converting them into a customer.

Learn more about what page load time means for your business’s website and how you can improve yours.

What is Page Load Time?

Also known as page speed, your page load time is a measurement of how long it takes for a page on your website to load. It’s typically measured in seconds, from the initial load request to the final rendering of all page content.

Your page load time is based on a number of factors, like your website server, page design, file sizes, image compression, and more.

In addition, different pages on your website can have different loading times based on each individual design. And to get even more complicated, different browsers (i.e., Google Chrome vs. Safari), different devices (i.e., desktop vs. mobile), and different locations (i.e., the USA vs. the UK) can all experience different loading times.

But in general, you can find your average page load time and make sure it meets the standards of both your potential website visitors and the search engine algorithms.

Why Page Load Time Matters

Your page load time matters because it’s a ranking factor in SEO. Google announced way back in 2010 that it was going to start using site speed as a factor in search engine ranking. And it jumped in the conversation again in 2018 to share that page speed was also now a factor for mobile search results.

In addition, slow websites cause a poor user experience. They’re also likely to lead to a higher bounce rate, or the rate of people who leave your site without engaging whatsoever, simply because there was no content loaded to engage with.

So, in short, page load time matters because:

• It reduces your chances of ranking in search
• It can create a poor user experience
• It can make people want to leave your site
• It can decrease customer satisfaction
• It can cause your business to lose money

How to Find Your Page Load Time

Thankfully, Google makes it easy for you to find your page load time with its PageSpeed Insights. You can also take advantage of other tools, like the site audit tools offered by Semrush or Ahrefs, to find slow pages and other factors impacting your SEO.

But let’s look at Google’s PageSpeed Insights now. Once you open the page, you’re immediately met with a text box for you to input a page’s URL. You can insert your home page or a specific landing page or blog post on your website.

Once you paste in the web page URL and click Analyze, you’ll be brought to your page load time results.

You can toggle back and forth between Mobile and Desktop to see the difference in how your page loads on the different devices. 

Other data you get access to includes:

• Whether your page has passed or failed Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment, which is the search engine’s latest method for analyzing rankability
• Loading time factors, like largest contentful paint (perceived load speed based on when a page’s main content has likely loaded), interaction to next paint (how quickly a user was able to interact with the content on the page), and more
• Diagnostics for improving page load time, plus the specific areas of the page that need improvements

As far as scoring goes, Google states that a score above 90 is good, and you don’t really need to make any changes. A score between 50-89 needs improvement and a score below 50 is poor.

Under the diagnostics section, you’ll see color coded symbols denoting how important each factor is. Those symbols mean:

• Green circle = good
• Orange square = needs improvement
• Red triangle = poor

Google provides links and information about each data point, helping you to understand what all of these initialisms mean and how they’re impacting your score. You can also copy a link to your page speed results and share it with your website developer so they can start working on some of the issues.

What Factors Impact Page Load Time?

While page load time doesn’t always boil down to just one or two things, there are a few factors that can negatively or positively affect your website’s loading speed.

• Website hosting: Your website host can have a big impact on your page speed. Find a host that’s reliable with a plan that puts an emphasis on loading time. Popular web hosting services include Bluehost, GoDaddy, and Hostinger.
• Website server: In a similar vein, the server your website lives on can make a difference. Larger websites will need bigger servers and websites that expect higher traffic rates will need more servers to ensure their site speed isn’t negatively affected.
• Image sizes: If you have massive images all over your website, it’s going to make your page load time take a big hit. Compressing your images and using smaller file sizes will help—but more on that later.
• Browser caching: Caching stores files of your website on local devices can help make your website load faster each time a user visits it again.
• Excess HTML, CSS, or JavaScript: Having excess script across your website can also negatively impact loading times.
• Mobile optimization: How well your website loads on mobile devices is also important to keep in mind. You need a responsive website design that’s easily loaded and navigable on smaller devices.

How to Improve Your Page Load Time

Simply put, longer page load times make people leave your website. When people leave your website (especially if they leave before it has even loaded), you’re losing potential customers, leading to decreased revenue.

So you need to figure out how to improve your page load time, speeding up your website, and providing a better user experience. These nine strategies can help.

If you prefer to learn via video, watch this below to learn even more about improving your website speed:

1. Choose the Right Image File Type

Different image file types or formats come with different file sizes and compression outcomes. It’s important to choose the right image format for your website so that the file size isn’t too large and so that the image can be compressed without losing quality.

Some common image formats to choose from are:

• JPEG
• PNG
• GIF
• WebP
• AVIF

JPEG and PNG file types are older, and often lead to larger image file sizes. JPEGs in general are notoriously difficult to compress without losing image quality, and PNG files are best for things that need to remain high-quality or have a transparent background like a logo.

GIFs are animated images, and can often come with a big file size attached. Depending on the reason you’re using the GIF, you may want to consider eliminating it altogether or embedding a video instead.

WebP and AVIF image file formats are more modern, which means they can be compressed into smaller, more website-friendly file sizes, but they’re also not universally supported yet. 

If possible, try to use WebP and AVIF file formats as often as possible. You can find online image converters that can help you change a JPEG or PNG image to a WebP or AVIF file type before you upload the image to your website.

2. Compress Your Images

In a similar vein, once you’ve settled on the right image file type, you need to compress your images. Some stock photos are automatically downloaded in huge file sizes. For example, I just downloaded the “original” size for this image, resulting in a 9600 x 5400 pixel 4.3 MB mammoth:

In an instance like this, you have two options:

• See if the stock image site or the source for your image has an option to download a small, more website-friendly image (this stock website let me download a small 640 x 360 pixel version at just 46 KB or a medium 1920 x 1080 pixel version at 216 KB)
• Use an image compression tool to minimize the size of your image (both its physical size and its file size) so that it can load much more quickly on a website

For the best results, try to keep your website images 200-300 KB or less. If you have a large background image, that can be up to 2-3 MB as the pixel size will need to be large enough to span across the entire web page.

3. Clean Your Code

Sometimes your website code works against you, with excess coding elements taking up unnecessary space. What you need to do here is something called minification. 

Minifying your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML removes these unnecessary code elements like commas, line breaks, spaces, and other snippets that are simply taking up space.

Let’s look at an example of minification. Below is a snippet of JavaScript that a developer might create for a website:

It’s properly written, but it takes up a lot of space. Minified, this JavaScript snippet now looks like this:

Even line breaks and longer stretches of code can take up more loading time than a smaller tidbit like this. So using a minification tool is a great way to speed up your page speed.

4. Upgrade Website Hosting

When you first started your business and created your website, you may have been erring on the side of budget-friendly when you selected your website host. But now, it might be time to upgrade.

Cheap website hosting rates, like those you see for just $5-10/month, can work well if you don’t have a lot of traffic going to your website. But these rates are for a shared server, and as you start to grow, sharing a server with millions of other websites isn’t going to cut it.

Consider switching to a dedicated host or upgrading to a dedicated server from your current host to make sure your website can handle the level of traffic it’s receiving without slowing down load times.

5. Enable Browser Caching

We touched on browser caching earlier. Essentially, enabling browser caching means that some pieces of your website are saved to a browser’s memory.

While this doesn’t impact loading time the first time someone goes to your website, it does make your website load much more quickly each subsequent time. This is because the browser has cached, or stored, some of your website files so that it doesn’t have to fully load each individual element every time it’s loaded up.

Keep in mind, though, that this means someone who has recently been to your website will see it the way it was the last time they visited it. So if you’ve changed a webpage or updated your website design, you will need to force a browser cache clear so people land on the new version, rather than the outdated one.

6. Reduce Redirects

A redirect is when you tell a URL to automatically redirect to a new URL. This is used if you need to consolidate web pages or change a URL slug. However, over time, you may accidentally accumulate different redirects.

For example, you may have redirected yourwebsite.com/product/ to yourwebsite.com/category/product/ last year when you started categorizing products after increasing your offerings.

Now, you’re updating your product categories again, so you’re redirecting yourwebsite.com/category/product/ to yourwebsite.com/new-category/product/.

This means that if anyone types in or clicks on the first link, they’ll be sent on a redirect chain from yourwebsite.com/product/ to yourwebsite.com/category/product/ to yourwebsite.com/new-category/product/.

Each subsequent redirect slows load time even more. If you’re adding a new redirect for a product category change, like this example, you’ll want to remove the first redirect and instead, send that old URL straight to the brand new product category.

7. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network or content distribution network is a system of servers with locations all over the world. A CDN essentially looks at the location of the person trying to access your website and sends a signal to a server near them, reducing loading time.

Jetpack has CDN that it offers completely for free, so you have no excuse not to sign up.

8. Test and Adjust

Keep testing your website speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. Look at the diagnostics the tool provides you with to continually update and adjust your website and its elements until you reach a “Good” page load time.

Takeaways

Find your own page load time and implement the necessary changes to improve it. Optimizing your page speed is a key part of improving your website’s user experience—which can also lead to a boost in website traffic and revenue.

Discover even more website user experience best practices to further encourage more visitors and engagement on your business website.