Speed is a crucial aspect in providing a pleasant user experience to visitors of your site. It ensures that a visitor’s limited attention span and time are spent on actual content and not wasted waiting for images and scripts to load.

The amount of people using mobile phones to access the web is growing rapidly, while the percentage of people using sluggish dial-up connections to the internet is decreasing. In certain areas, such as social media and search, mobile usage has already surpassed desktop usage. As everyone who uses a smartphone on a regular basis knows, waiting for a web page to load completely over a cellular data connection is really annoying.

No matter the medium via which your website’s visitors arrive, speed is of the utmost importance. Google found that even a little delay of 100 to 400 milliseconds on their search results page caused a noticeable drop in traffic. According to other research, roughly one-third of your visitors will abandon your site if it takes longer than two seconds to load. Plus, it’s quite unlikely that they’ll return. Because Google now considers page load times when ranking websites, a slow site is less likely to appear on the first page of search engine results.

Improving your website’s speed can be broken down into two main groups: decreasing the size of your files and decreasing the number of times your site communicates with the server.