4 things you can do to improve the loading speed of your website

Since April 2010, Google has used site speed (or how quickly a website page loads) as one of the many factors to rank your website higher in their search engine.

Google's reasoning was that the quicker a web page loaded the better the visitor experience.

In Google's own words, "Faster sites create happy users .... Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings."

The speed at which your website loads on desktop and mobile devices has never been more important in search engine optimisation than it is now.

The way people consume media has dramatically changed. With our busy lifestyles, more and more people are accessing their information on the go - in the car, on the train and waiting in line for their coffee.

People expect to be able to access information immediately. They don't have time to wait and will quickly leave a site if it doesn't respond fast enough.

Here's 4 things you can do, using your content management system, to ensure faster load times to help improve your customers online experience:

1. Compress all javascripts and CSS files (it is quicker to read and smaller to load).
2. Resize your images before you upload them up onto the internet (Don't upload large images and resize using content manager programs, as it will still be large and slow to load).
3. Remove all unused page elements. (example: empty tables or divs, line spaces and returns, empty dot points).
4. Remotely loading content - offsite loading (example: social media connections, youtube videos, remote scripting and or fonts).

Test your website page speed

You can test your website page speed using Google's Page Speed Insights or Web Page Test.

Not only are these page speed testers really helpful in getting an idea of your site's speed, they can also tell you about other areas of your website that you can use to make your website ultra fast.

There are also many addons for most website browsers that test page load speeds:

• Chrome: Page Load Time or PageSpeed Insights
• Firefox: Firebug or Page Speed Monitor

FatGalah continues to develop its content management and shopping cart systems to ensure faster load speed times.

We've improved the page load speeds our own website fatgalah.com which scored 93% on desktop and 84% on mobile, with our responsive Content Management System loading in just under 1 second!

Test your page load speed, use the 4 tips above and if you need help making your website faster, we'd love to chat!