If a quarter of that time involves a blank screen, who wouldn't bounce? Due to heightened focus on the UX bottleneck of page load delays, Google and Facebook, the audience members' two top web referrers, warned site owners to pay close attention to site load times for several years now. As early as 2010, Google announced that site speed was used as a ranking signal, and experiments have proven that slow load times are correlated with lower search rankings. (Facebook's Instant Articles platform and Google's AMP solution are just some of these web giants' initiatives to help site owners speed things up — more on that below.) Being average just isn't good enough.
If your site is running at average speeds, this is actually costing you business opportunities and potential revenue. And in the age hair masking service of mobile, more than ever, speed is crucial. Fortunately, there is a lot you can do to speed up your site and its various pieces of content. Let's review a few different types of solutions, including infrastructure optimizations you can do yourself and third-party tools and services you can use to save those precious seconds. DIY site optimizations Structurally, there are several aspects of your site that you can focus on to improve load times.
Some may require the help of a developer to set up, but nothing here is above the pay grade of a typical contemporary marketer to use on an ongoing basis. 1. Use the correct image file type and upload protocol Visuals are often the heaviest files on your site, and optimizing them can make a significant difference to your site's load times. Ilya Grigorik, Senior Web Performance Engineer at Google, recently published an in-depth guide on optimizing images to ensure more effective content on the Google Developers site. Here are some of the main takeaways.