Why your website should load in under two seconds

Every extra second a page takes to load, more visitors give up and hit back. Most of them are on a phone, often on a patchy connection, and they have a competitor one tap away.

Google measures this too. Page speed is part of how it ranks sites, so a slow site is harder to find as well as harder to use.

What usually makes a website slow

• Huge photos. A 6 MB photo straight from a camera, shown at the size of a postcard.
• Page builders and plugins. Each one adds code to every page, whether the page uses it or not.
• Too many fonts. Five weights of three typefaces is a lot of downloading before any text appears.
• Third-party widgets. Chat bubbles, pop-ups and trackers that each load their own scripts.

How I keep sites fast

1. Photos are resized and converted to modern formats automatically, at the exact size each screen needs.
2. Pages are built with a modern framework that sends only the code a page uses.
3. One typeface, two or three weights, loaded efficiently.
4. Every widget has to earn its place. Most sites do not need a chat bubble.

Fast is also cheaper to run

Lighter pages use less bandwidth, need less hosting and have fewer things to update or break. Speed is one of those rare improvements that saves money while it makes money.

Every website I launch is tested for speed on a mid-range phone before it goes live. See what is included.