Why Site Speed Matters

When a customer eats at a restaurant, slow service often leads to poor reviews and fewer future customers. Similarly, slow site speed can lead to lower search engine rankings, decreased site traffic, and negative user experiences.

What is Site Speed?

Website speed, or performance, refers to how quickly a browser loads fully functional webpages from a site. Poorly performing sites that render slowly can drive users away. In contrast, fast-loading sites attract more traffic and improve conversion rates.

Why is Site Speed Important?

Conversion Rate:
Multiple studies have demonstrated that site speed affects conversion rate (or, the rate at which users complete a desired action). Not only do more users stay on fast-loading sites, they also convert at higher rates compared to slower sites. A number of companies have found that a decrease in page load time of a few milliseconds increases conversions:

• Mobify found that decreasing their homepage's load time by 100 milliseconds resulted in a 1.11% uptick in session-based conversion.
• Retailer AutoAnything experienced a 12-13% increase in sales after cutting page load time in half.
• Walmart discovered that improving page load time by one second increased conversions by 2%.

Improving site performance is key to conversion rate optimization, and DAASP focuses on this to ensure client success.

Bounce Rate:
The bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave a website after viewing only one page. Users are likely to close the window or click away if a page does not load within a few seconds. For example, the BBC discovered that they lost 10% of their total users for every additional second it took for their pages to load.

SEO Best Practices:
Because Google tends to prioritize getting relevant information to users as quickly as possible, site performance is an important factor in Google search rankings.

At DAASP, we emphasize optimizing sites for speed, particularly for mobile devices, to improve SEO rankings.

User Experience:
Long page load times and poor response times to user actions create a bad user experience. Waiting for content to load becomes frustrating for users and may provoke them into leaving the site or application altogether. DAASP ensures that your website provides a seamless and fast experience for users.

What Factors Affect Site Speed?

Page Weight:
The amount of resources a website needs to load makes a huge impact on site performance. Large JavaScript files, videos, heavy CSS, and high-definition images add significant 'weight' to a webpage. A waiter delivering 10 dishes serves slower; similarly, a page needing more resources loads slower.

Keeping websites light, with small file sizes and quick loading, has become harder as web technologies grow. Single-page apps, third-party pop-ups, and moving backgrounds add more functionality and increase average page weight. DAASP helps in managing and optimizing these complexities to ensure your site remains fast and efficient.

Network Conditions:
Even if a website is designed to be lightweight, it may not load quickly in browsers due to network slowness. The local networking equipment used and the quality of the ISP's services impact network connectivity. Mobile devices on 3G or 4G, instead of WiFi, have slower connections. Although this is mostly out of developers' control, techniques like minification and compression can still speed up delivery over slow connections. Techniques include minification, compression, and hosting content with a CDN. At DAASP, we utilize these techniques to ensure your website performs optimally regardless of network conditions.

Hosting Location:
If content has to travel a long way to arrive where it is needed, this results in a high amount of network latency. For instance, if a website's HTML and CSS files are hosted in a data center in Ohio, and its images are hosted in a data center in Florida, a user on the west coast will have to wait while all of these files travel thousands of miles to their device.

What Website Performance Metrics Are Important?

Load Time:
Load time is how long it takes for an entire webpage to appear in the browser, which means every HTTP request has to be fulfilled. Almost every page on the Internet will require multiple HTTP requests, because multiple resources need to be loaded in addition to the basic HTML of the page.

Page Size:
Page size refers to the total file size of all resources required for the page to function. It significantly impacts how long it takes for a browser to load the page. Additionally, larger page sizes can have a big impact on mobile users, who may incur data charges as they load webpages.

Time To First Byte (TTFB):
TTFB measures the amount of time between a browser's request for a webpage and when the very first byte of the response arrives. Overall load time is more important, but TTFB is still taken into account when assessing website performance, and it may impact SEO.

Number of Round Trips:
The number of round trips measures how many times a request/response needs to travel all the way to an origin server and back. The more round trips a webpage requires, the greater the latency.

Round Trip Time (RTT):
RTT is the amount of time it takes for requests to make a round trip, meaning the request reaches the origin server and the response travels back to the device that made the request.

How Does DAASP Speed Up Websites?

Websites that use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) load much more quickly. DAASP ensures that your content is optimized and, when necessary, cached in multiple locations to reduce latency. This approach means that requests from user devices do not have to travel long distances to origin servers, resulting in lower load times and RTT.