Marketers are constantly reviewing their own and client's websites, determining what content, links and layout of the site can be improved to maximise search engine optimisation (SEO) as well as improving user journeys and user interaction. There are a number of questions that also need to be considered including: 'Do we need a responsive site?' and 'Are we using the best calls to action on the homepage and throughout the site?'

Site Speed

A study conducted found that 47% of people expect a website they click on to load in two seconds or less and if it doesn't load in time the user will simply go to another competitor's website. If a site's speed is slow it can impact on the user giving them a negative experience. Not only can slow site speeds slow your users down it can also impact on SEO as Google can penalise you in search results.

If your website has slow load speeds it can slow down your results search pages by 100 to 400 milliseconds and this has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user. It is important for you to test your website's speed to make sure you are maximising your website reach.

What aspects are slowing your site down? 

There are a number of offenders that can be the cause of your slow website and we have supplied a brief list of the most important ones to take into consideration:

Analytics tags: Analytics, that is, JavaScript based with Analytics tags, can impact on your load speed and, don't get me wrong, analytics is a great tool but you need to make sure you use another tag code.

Network code: Ad network code that uses JavaScript is another factor that may be slowing down your site speed, and ad revenue is a must for your bottom line.

Bloated HTML: the amount of data increases due to bloated HTML can impact on your JavaScript performance.

Images: On pages that have heavy images and videos you need to reduce the file size of images which can have an enormous effect on your website speeds

Testing Website Speeds

There are a number of useful tools you can use to test the speed of your website so you can determine what needs to be implemented if your website does have slow load speed. The tools include webwait, linkvendor, webpage test and a whole range of others.