Page Speed Optimization

Understanding Page Speed Optimization

Page speed optimization is a process of making the loading time of websites faster. At Ellenom, we have spent years perfecting techniques for making websites fast as lightning for visitors. A fast website really is not just a good idea: It's absolutely necessary to hold the interest of visitors and to enhance your placement in the search outcomes.

Back in 2018, our team assisted a local restaurant chain whose website loaded almost in 8 seconds. Visitors actually were abandoning the site before even seeing the menu! The load time went down to less than 2 seconds after the optimization of images, code restructuring, and browser caching. And their online reservations received a whopping increase of 37% in the month after.

Web development is done keeping speed in mind right from day one. Unlike most agencies that first build a site and optimize it later, we embed performance at every step of our process. This way, clients save on time and cost, and our work produces even better results.

It basically means getting your site to load as fast as it can possibly be optimized across all devices. This encompasses a multitude of techniques, including code optimization, image compression, server enhancement, and delivering content through the best possible delivery method.

The web got another facelift in the last few years. Mobile has crushed the desktop with a rise and instant results are expected by users. Page speed is a ranking factor now at Google, viz., downgrading slow sites in search-results. In this kind of scenario, optimization is no longer an option; it is a prerequisite for the success of an online endeavor.

Importance of Page Speed for Your Business

The question in everyone's mind could be "why are we passionate about page speed at Ellenom." Simple reason: speed touches directly upon your bottom line. Studies have shown again and again that sites that are fast at generating leads, sales, and customer satisfaction.

Consider the following facts that we tell every one of our clients:

• 47% of visitors expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less
• 40% will abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load
• A 1-second delay can reduce conversions by 7%
• 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy from that site again

Last year, we consulted with a London-based online clothing retailer, and their struggle was high bounce rates. Their well-crafted site has took about five seconds to load, a long period for today's shoppers. After our SEO and performance team optimized their site, loading time came down to 1.8 seconds. The effect was amazing-his bounce rate went down by 28 percent, but his conversion rate shot up by 23 percent.

Page speed also influences the way Google and other search engines rank your site. Since 2018, Google's been using mobile speed for ranking. This means that even with all great content and backlinks, a slow site would have tremendous difficulty getting to the top of searches.

It's even more important to mobile users because a lot of them are on slower connections and just don't have as much patience when it comes to waiting. A quick mobile experience isn't just good practice-it's essential in reaching a significant portion of your audience.

Factors Affecting the Website's Speed

At Ellenom, we consider a number of factors while optimizing for the speed of a website. Understanding these elements allows us to create faster experiences for the customers of our clients. Here are the major essence factors that affect how faster your pages will load:

Quality of Hosting: Your web host is the foundation of your house, which supports everything else. We have seen too many businesses saving bucks with cheap hosting and losing customers from slow loading times. Good web hosting affects the speed of response from the server significantly.

Image Size and Format: Images can be the heaviest occupants on a page for the most part. If they are not well optimized, they tend to harm a web page's loading speed immensely. One of the photography clients we worked with had 15MB worth of images on the portfolio page, which were optimized down to 3MB without a perceivable loss of image quality, thus giving a 70 percent improvement in terms of speed.

Code Efficiency: Bloatware code creates unnecessary components to be loaded. Clean and less code uses subsequently lesser resources. This applies to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Ongoing audits at Ellenom eliminate unused code for better performance.

Third-Party Scripts: Scads of outside scripts close in on loading time: analytics, advertisement, social-media widgets-the list is endless. We help our clients analyze which third-party tools are really needed and find ways to deploy them that have as little impact on speed as possible.

Browser Caching: When set up properly, browser caching enables returning users to load your site a lot faster because their page elements are stored onto their devices. We impart next-generation caching strategies that keep freshness in check while enhancing speed.

Content Delivery Networks: A CDN will distribute your website across multiple servers worldwide, thus serving content from locations closer to your visitors. Implementing CDN for our clients with global exposure can help reduce load times by as much as 50%.

Page Speed Metrics That You Should Not Ignore

Measuring page speed isn't as simple as using a stopwatch. At Ellenom, we track several specific metrics that give us a complete picture of how users experience your website's performance.

Time to First Byte (TTFB): This measures how long it takes for the first byte of information to reach a user's browser after they request your page. TTFB reveals how quickly your server responds, which is affected by your hosting, server configuration, and backend code efficiency.

First Contentful Paint (FCP): This marks the time when the first content (text, image, etc.) appears on the screen. It's the moment when users first see something happening, which influences their perception of your site's speed.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures when the largest content element becomes visible. Google considers this an important user-centric metric and recommends an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures visual stability-how much elements move around as the page loads. A low CLS score means elements don't shift unexpectedly, creating a better user experience.

Total Blocking Time (TBT): This measures the time between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive, indicating how long it takes before users can actually interact with your page.

It's more than just an ecommerce client. They were losing several customers in the process of mobile check-out. Thus improving their LCP and CLS scored on a reel smoother experience, creating an 18%-increase in mobile conversions.

Common Page Speed Issues and Solutions

Over the years at Ellenom, we have seen countless websites that bear similar speed problems with one another. Knowing common problems helps us identify and fix the problem quickly within a certain site. Below are the common problems that we come across along with the solutions we apply:

Unoptimized Images: Large image files are among the biggest things that slow down websites. We do resize images; spare use of newer forms such as webp, implement lazy loading (images are only shown when they come into view), configure responsive images to render smaller files for mobile devices.

Render-Blocking Resources: Certain CSS and JavaScript files force browsers to suspend rendering until they are parsed. Critical-CSS method, deferring non-essential JavaScript, and restructuring resource loading enable elimination from this bottleneck.

Excessive HTTP Requests: An HTTP request is needed each time an element on a page is rendered (images, scripts, stylesheets). More requests mean the longer load time. Combining files thus, CSS sprites for the icons and applying resource hints like preconnect and preload can reduce such requests.

No or Wrong Caching: Browsers repeat downloading the same resources without caching. Now we use both browser caching and server-side caching so that common data are kept as cached instead of suffering load time for each return visit from a browser.

Overweight Plugins and Themes: In CMS WordPress, they will have very poorly coded plugins and themes, affecting speed affected heavily. Our website maintenance division does a regular checkup of these plugins, removing the inefficient ones and many times creating lightweight handy solutions for them.

Last quarter, we were able to assist a client from an educational sector where their WordPress site took 7+ seconds to load. The cause? Accumulated a total of 28 plugins over time, many performed overlapping functions, and many were not being used at all but still stayed installed. We consolidated the functionality, which took some of the redundant plugins out of use, and optimized the theme to well below 3 seconds while including all the features that were necessary.

Speed Mobile Optimization

Mobile Optimization at Ellenom never was an option any such thing; from over 60% of web traffic now coming from mobile devices, to ensure that it gets loaded easily on smartphones for the benefit of the business.

Unique challenges concern mobile users: network connections are much slower, their processors are more limited, and they're usually quite a bit less patient than users who use desktops. We have formulated strategies, particularly, to address these challenges:

Mobile First Design - Rather than requiring designs for desktop environments that would then be adapted to a mobile space (which most often leads to code bloat), we start with mobile designs and build up. Thus mobile users are assured an experience that has been created with and optimized for their devices.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): We offer this page template to content-heavy sites that need speed; we implement Google's AMP framework particularly in articles. A client that has featured in our news site registered a 34% increase in mobile engagement while using AMP versions of articles.

Touch Optimization: They touch their mobile devices but never get to use the mouse cursor. We make certain that interactive elements are designed to be an appropriate size and space for touch, which enhances usability and perceived speedreducing user error.

Network Aware: We have adaptive loading techniques that recognize the current type of connectivity and deliver the content accordingly. For example, on slower connections, we might lower the resolution of pictures or simplify some features to retain speed.

Reduced Motion: Movement and transition, while highly beneficial in creating desktop experiences, slow down the performance of the mobile device rendering and drain the battery. We have such reduced motion features that use self-simplification of animation for mobile users.

For instance, one of the interesting cases we've handled was for a small business website-it looked absolutely beautiful on the desktops, but it took about 12 seconds to start being interactive on 3G. By adopting progressive loading methods and changing their JavaScript organization, we managed to bring their mobile interactive time down to 3.8 seconds with all functionalities intact.

Some businesses might think that as 5G rolls out, mobile optimization becomes a less important aspect. Our experience indicates, however, that fast connections do not mean that optimized sites will not fare better than bloated sites in terms of user experience and even search rankings.

Your Page Speed Optimization at Ellenom

At Ellenom, we don't believe that there is a single optimized standard for page speed improvement. We have a holistic process with the flexibility to adapt to each client's unique needs, making sure it works smoothly, where results are consistent.

This is the way we go towards page speed for our clients:

Initial Speed Audit: Run a series of speed tests via a couple of tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, and GTmetrix, across devices and connection speeds to show everything about the performance issues within a site.

Prioritization of Issues: Not all speed issues are as pressing or as impactful as others. In identifying priority issues, we highlight the low-hanging fruit that would give the largest return for the least effort along with critical issues that should be addressed regardless of how simple or complex they may require.

Technical Improvements: Our developers implement server-side improvements including HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 protocols, GZIP compression, and proper header configuration. Other than that, we also optimize database queries and implement caching strategies based on each site's traffic patterns.

Content Delivery Optimization: We very carefully configured CDNs to serve your website around the world, reducing latency for anyone in any location. For many of our clients, this would, by itself, substantially improve performance for their international audiences.

Code Refactoring: Our frontend developers go through the frontend code, removing redundancy, minifying files, and applying modern coding standards to improve rendering speed in the browser.

Therefore, Continuous Monitoring: It is not a one-time job to be speed optimized. We will also install continuous monitoring, which alerts us to any performance regression, allowing us to fix issues before they finally reach users.

Recently we worked with a financial sector client who wanted the site to comply with some extremely stringent performance requirements due to compliance issues. We went through our broad optimization processes to not only meet required metrics but also surpass them, with a reduction in load times by 67% and better overall security stance.

What distinguishes us is a business-appropriate attention paid to the context at which interests lie. We do not chase the speed scores in the abstract as other people do, but look specifically in optimizing their use journeys into your specific business goals.

Tools for Monitoring and Testing Page Speed

Only the right tools will empower you to enhance the speed of your website. At Ellenom, we apply a unique blend of industry-standard and proprietary tools to monitor the performance of our clients' websites.

Here is a list of some of our main tools:

Google PageSpeed Insights: A free utility, providing lab and field data about your site's performance. It scores your site separately for mobile and desktop, giving a list of recommendations for improvement. We start on most projects mainly with this tool.

Lighthouse: Lighthouse is a set of audits integrated into Google Chrome's developer tools that enables auditing for performance, accessibility, and more. We conduct audits using Lighthouse at different stages of development to catch issues earlier down the line.

WebPageTest: This advanced tool allows us to test your site from various locations using different browsers and connection speeds while offering waterfall charts indicating exactly when each element loads so we can spot bottlenecks.

GTmetrix: GTmetrix pulls results from PageSpeed Insights and YSlow in order to provide in-depth reports and actionable recommendations. Its video feature allows us to capture a recording of your site loading, a valuable tool for identifying visual stability issues.

New Relic: We deploy New Relic mainly to monitor server response and database performance in real-time for complex websites with dynamic content. This is helpful when diagnosing back-end issues that lead to frontend speed issues.

Besides these tools, we have a monitoring system of our own that continuously evaluates the performance of client websites and alerts the website security team to the degradation of such performance. This way, we prevent problems from surfacing and having the user experience impacted.

We do not just run tests but also train our clients to understand these tools themselves. A recent retail project saw us setting up a customized dashboard to present real-time insights of their site's performance to the marketing team, thus enabling the team to take speedy content decisions.

The tools are data providers; the experts provide solutions. Actual value arises when metrics that matter to your particular business goals are known and improvement vectors for those metrics are well articulated.

Page Speed, SEO, and Conversions

Here at Ellenom, we have learnt how page speed directly affects search engine ranking and conversion rates. These are not mere technical considerations; they translate into business fundamentals that affect your bottom line directly.

Let's start with SEO. Since 2018, Google has been using page speed as a ranking parameter for both mobile and desktop searches. The year 2021 saw the introduction of Core Web Vitals under the Page Experience signals, further enhancing speed's importance to search visibility.

Among our clients in the legally competitive sector were those who were unable to rank even with excellent content. Page load time on their website on mobile was 6.2 s. After we optimised it to 2.3 s, their organic traffic started to grow, increasing by 28% in the next three months with no change in their content strategy.

The conversion angle is even more pronounced. Studies have shown:

• Conversion rates for pages that load in 1 second are three times higher than for pages that load in 5 seconds
• It has been proven that conversion rates can increase by 1% for every 100 ms of improvement in load time
• 53% of mobile site visitors abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load

We helped an online retailer in the hectic holiday selling season with a performance enhancement right before Black Friday; this produced a phenomenal result: their average page load time improved from 4.2 seconds to 1.8 seconds and their conversion rate increased by 32% compared to the previous year's sale period.

Page speed also impacts other useful metrics, such as bounce rate, pages viewed per session, and average session duration. Faster sites keep their visitors engaged for longer, increasing chances for conversion.

The bottom line is that investing in page speed optimization is not a tech-fanatic's dream; it is a business prerogative with measurable ROI. When we increase the speed of your website, we make an immediate impact on your marketing ability and sales propensity.

Future Trends in Website Performance Optimization

At Ellenom, we don't just fix performance problems for today—we prepare our clients for the web environment in the future. Understanding the emerging trends puts us in a better position to build sites that remain fast and competitive for years to come.

Here are some major trends we are monitoring and implementing:

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs): PWAs combine everything great about web pages and mobile apps: offline capabilities, app-like interface, and stunning performance. We have been helping clients to PWA architecture-adoption which dramatically enhanced mobile engagement and repeat visitor rates.

HTTP/3 and QUIC: The next revolution of HTTP uses QUIC transport protocol to reduce the time for creating a connection and to enhance performance-especially in mobile networks. We are implementing this for the clients that think ahead and want to stay ahead.

Core Web Vitals Focus: Google keeps improving Core Web Vitals. More weight is being added to factors affecting user experience, such as visual stability and interactivity. From now on, these factors will be part of our web design strategy from the outset of the project, rather than being an afterthought.

Machine Learning Optimization: Cutting-edge tools have begun using machine learning to predict and prevent performance bottlenecks. One possibility that we're exploring is how to create systems that adjust delivery automatically according to connection quality, device capabilities, and patterns of user behavior.

JavaScript Optimization: It has now become imperative to deliver JS efficiently because of the proliferation of JavaScript frameworks. We are using cutting-edge methods: partial hydration, islands architecture, and resumable frameworks, yielding significant outcomes for JS performance.

A recent project with a media client introduced the establishment of a JavaScript budget for each respective page type, so that interactivity enhancements do not come at the cost of core performance. It was a 42% improvement in interaction to next page load time.

Tracing the cutting-edge performance tactics to keep our clients' websites in the fast lane and ever-effective is our resolve as browsers evolve and users' demands keep on increasing.