Why your website needs to be fast

A visitor who has to wait simply leaves. They won’t tell you why: they go back to Google and click the next result. You’ll never know they were there.

I timed my weather website, the one for my own weather station in Vinelz. It took 3.7 seconds to appear. Today it takes 1.6.

I didn’t change the way it works. Two things were slowing it down.

It asked for its fonts too late. The fonts a website uses aren’t stored on the visitor’s computer: they have to be sent over. Mine were requested at the wrong moment, so the browser made four trips instead of one. Ask for them right at the start, and everything arrives together.

Its photos were too big. They were a quarter larger than the size they’re displayed at. It’s like printing a poster only to fold it into your wallet. Once I’d resized them, they were up to 84% lighter. On screen, you can’t tell the difference. I checked.

Check your own site

Open your website on your phone, with wi-fi switched off. Count the seconds.

If it takes more than two seconds for anything to appear, there’s work to do.

And if the screen stays blank before the text shows up, the fonts are often the ones running late.

If you’d like to know what’s slowing yours down, drop me a line. I’ll measure it and tell you what I find – whether or not you then ask me to fix it.