For modern websites with lots of graphics, videos and animations, fast loading times are a crucial factor. Both for sustainability and the user experience. This is because a fast-loading website consumes less power and brings with it significantly improved usability.
As we know from studies: 90% of all visitors leave a website again if it has not built up within 5 seconds. Most of the time, users do not return to such a page, but in the worst case switch to the competitor.
On average, the site visitor expects a loading time of about 2-3 seconds.
With Page Speed Insights, Google provides a very comprehensive tool that can be used to measure the loading time and other relevant data of a website.
To constantly optimize their search engine and thus provide the user with constantly better search results, Google also evaluates data and lets it flow into their ranking. Since 2009, Google has been calling on web designers to improve the so-called page speed, i.e. the speed of the page structure, with a particular focus on optimization for mobile devices.
But how can the loading time be improved now?
As programmers, we have a big impact on energy efficiency when developing and maintaining websites.
Video and image optimization
Images and videos create emotionality and are common on today's websites. The more data volume these take up on a website, the more data needs to be transferred.
By using certain file formats and reducing the file size, up to a few GB of data can often be saved without sacrificing impact, depending on the number of images and videos present.
Slim Code
Web construction kits or even some CMS systems are easy and often intuitive to use, but always come with a whole lot of code that often makes the website much heavier than necessary. Often, scripts or plugins that are not needed are loaded by default.
Experienced web developers can save quite a bit of data volume by reducing the code, which in turn can also lead to faster loading times.
Less Javascript
Another adjusting screw for improving performance is the careful and reduced use of Javascript. Depending on its use, the browser-based programming language quickly produces countless lines of code that unnecessarily bloat a website.
Mobile first
Another approach is to improve and predominantly focus on responsive websites, i.e. pages that are optimized for mobile devices. For a website that is largely only opened on mobile devices, for example, there is no need to use high-resolution images that cannot be read by smartphones and tablets anyway.
Google has been following the 'mobile-only' approach to indexing websites since March 2021. This is Google's response to the fact that more and more search queries are being sent exclusively from smartphones and similar small devices. Websites that are not responsive are no longer crawled by Google and thus gradually disappear from the search results. These are just a few ways to positively influence the performance of a website.
For more in-depth information, we are always available for a conversation.