What Is Website Speed?

Date First Published: 1st September 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Development

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 4/10

CONTENTS

What Factors Have An Effect On Website Speed?
Importance Of Website Speed
Website Speed Measurements
Website Speed Tools

Learn more about what website speed is in this article.

Website speed refers to how quickly the pages of a website load in a visitor's web browser. A website with a fast page speed will load pages quicker in a visitor's web browser, whilst a website with a slow page speed will take a long time to download and display pages in a visitor's web browser, increasing the bounce rate and causing visitors to become impatient, encouraging them to leave the website.

Website speed can also be known as website performance, but this term is a bit misleading as there are much more factors than the speed of pages that measure the overall performance of a website. Uptime, broken links, bounce rate, domain authority score, average session duration, security, and conversion rates are all factors unrelated to speed that measure the overall performance.

What Factors Have An Effect On Website Speed?

There are so many factors that have an effect on the speed that pages load in web browsers. Below are the five key factors that affect this.

Page weight

This is the greatest factor that affects website speed. The page weight is the number of resources a website needs to load. Large images, videos, JavaScript files, CSS files, and HTML pages all increase the loading time of a page. The more resources a page needs to load, the slower it will load as it will force the web browser to work harder to download all of that large content. Pagination is often used to avoid pages from becoming overloaded by separating the contents into separate pages.

Note:

The average total page weight is constantly going up with advanced and complex web technologies.

Geographical location

All web servers are computers located somewhere in the world. The longer the distance between the device making HTTP requests and the device serving those requests, the longer it will take to load website files. For example, visitors in the United Kingdom requesting to view web content that is hosted on a server located in the United States will have to deal with longer page loading times since the requests will have to travel across the Atlantic Ocean.

The solution to this is using a CDN, such as Cloudflare. CDNs enable users to connect to a geographically closer data centre rather than wherever the web server of a website is located. Since they automatically choose the best server for each user, users don't have to manually choose the best location. The CDN could store the content on a United Kingdom PoP (Point of Presence), reducing latency.

Web caching

Web caching is the process of temporarily storing recently requested files, information, and data into a cache or storage location so that they can be accessed faster in the future. Web caching will make websites load quicker as it reduces the number of requests made to the web server. Pages can be cached in web browsers and CDNs.

Congestion and excessive traffic

If too many people are using a website at the same time, this will slow the server down and greatly increase the page loading time. This happens when the server receives more requests than it can handle, causing it to slow down and become less responsive. Usually, congestion is a temporary issue. However, congestion that lasts for extended periods of time indicate more serious issues, like DDoS attacks.

The internet connection, router, and ISP

ISPs can sometimes throttle traffic, meaning that they can intentionally slow down bandwidth without telling the user. This can increase the page loading time and cause large files, such as images to fail to load.

301 redirects

301 redirects redirect a user from one URL to another. The time spent redirecting users slows down website speed. Sometimes, URLs can contain multiple redirects. For example, a URL might redirect a user to URL 2, then URL 2 might redirect them to URL 3, to URL 4, and then finally to URL 5. These long redirects should be avoided as they can cause users to get bored of waiting for the actual page to display. In addition, multiple redirects make websites look untrustworthy as scam sites commonly redirect users to another site, that site redirects them to another site, and so on.

Importance Of Website Speed

Website speed is very important for the following reasons:

User experience

Long page load times and a slow response to user actions create a bad user experience. When a page keeps loading and loading, users will eventually get bored of waiting and leave the website. This increases the bounce rate as it will cause visitors to leave after viewing a single page. A decent website speed will give a good user experience.

Visitor retention

A fast website with a reduced loading time will retain visitors. It is very easy to lose visitors when a website is too slow to load. For example, research by Akamai Technologies discovered that 53% of mobile users will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

SEO

Page speed is a minor factor that search engines, such as Google use to rank pages. Google has been using page speed as a ranking factor since 2010. If Google saw a website and a competitor's website of the same relevance to a search query, the faster page of those two will rank higher.

Conversions and Sales

A faster website speed can increase conversions, lower bounces, and increase sales. Conversions occur when a user performs an action on a website, such as filling out a form or signing up for a newsletter. Website speed has an effect on visitor satisfaction and the happier people are when using a website, the more likely they are to complete an action or purchase an item, generating sales for the company.

Website Speed Measurements

Various different measurements of website speed exist, which are below:

Load time - The period of time that it takes for a webpage to appear in a browser. This time includes every HTTP request. Since multiple resources needed to be loaded with the HTML page, almost every page will require multiple HTTP requests.
Page size - The total file size of all the resources.
Round Trip Time (RTT) - The period of time that it takes for requests to make a round trip. The number of round trips measures how many times a request needs to travel all the way back to an origin server and back. More round trips result in higher latency.
Time To First Byte (TTFB) - Measures the latency of a web server. It is the period of time between a browser's request for a webpage and when the first byte of response arrives from the web server.
DNS lookup time - Measures how long it takes for DNS to translate the domain name into a corresponding IP address. More third-party resources will increase the DNS lookup time as DNS would have to also translate the third-party domains into corresponding IP addresses.
Time to interactive - The period of time from when a user makes a request for a website to when they can start interacting with the elements of the website, such as clicking on buttons. It measures when the page is ready for the user to use.
Time to title - The period of time that it takes for the title of a website to appear in the browser tab. Before the title appears, the web browser displays a loading circle.
Time to start render - The period of time that it takes for content to start showing on the page after a request for the website has been sent.