The pageload explained
To understand the pageload of a Web site, the following example helps:
The purchase for the week is pending. You can’t carry more than four full shopping bags
Sure, you could carry more bags with a car, but the purchase and cost speak against it for you or you prefer to walk the short distance.
One of the shopping bags is unasked by the supermarket with promotional material and questionnaires – you only have three left.
A wide shopping bag is filled with products you don’t need at all – just two bags left at your disposal.
Another bag is filled with empty packaging from other products because the supermarket has not sorted them out beforehand.
In the end, you only have one bag for your products – the rest is filled with products or contaminated sites that you simply don’t need.
Most websites are built on this principle – we do it differently.
Transfer to your website
What inflates your website?
Tracking & Advertising
Many websites exaggerate it and follow the motto: “a lot helps a lot”.
Bloatware
Often, many more features are provided than are actually needed.
Technical debt
Websites that have grown over the years often deliver legacy issues, at best without function, in bad cases with unresolved bugs or vulnerabilities.
What’s left
If you set a limit on how much weight your website should have – how much do you give away through avoidable ballast?
What exactly is the pageload?
The pageload is generally a term for the weight of your Web site. This is made up of the following factors:
- Size of the page including all files.
- Number of files, especially from external sources.
- The entire website is delivered from the server to the user.
Always keep an eye on
Size of the page
According to Google, a website should be up to 1600 KB in size. Users with a 3G mobile connection should also be able to load a website within a maximum of 10 seconds.
But even with a faster internet connection, many users have slow devices, use their smartphones for many years and therefore prefer fast websites.
Therefore, make sure that you do not exceed the target of 1600 KB.
An important indication
Number of files
Especially with mobile data connections, the number of files that can be downloaded at the same time is limited – even more so: the connection often eats up additional time.
Check your website with PageSpeed Insights – MatchMetrics’recommendation : A maximum of 50 requests should be required to load your website – this includes every resource on your website, including images, but also files that deliver plugins or theme. The average in Germany is between 72 and 177 resources, depending on the sector.
Check that they don’t deliver more than 50 resources to your site – don’t forget to do the most functional subpages.
Particularly important
Duration of website delivery
For example, use PageSpeed Insightsto check how long a user has to wait before they can interact with your site – it’s not just the time it takes to transfer the data. The effort required by the browser to calculate your design or scripts also delay the appearance of the website.
On average, it takes 22 seconds to load a mobile LandingPage. 53 of all visitors to a mobile website leave it directly if the loading time is more than 3 seconds.
Your charging time is more than three seconds?
Then the chance is high that the bounce rate on your site is over 50 – improving the loading time is your biggest lever to improve the user experience and conversion rate.
We recommend a maximum charging time of 0.5 seconds.
Recommendation
Use your pageload for content
Good content consumes memory, must be transferred and calculated for display in the browser – don’t give away meaningful capacities for plugins that don’t really need it or to a theme that wastes your capacity.
A low pageload results in a higher PageSpeed and thus improves the Google quality factor of your website – in the organic index and in adwords.
We have created a PageSpeed comparison for top WordPress themes – and with which tools and optimizations you can immediately improve the PageLoad of your website.