What Is Load Time? Unpacking the Importance of Website Load Time

What Is Load Time

Whenever I open a book, the goal is to get to the right page, where I left off, in the fastest time possible. There are ways to improve that speed and make the process more efficient.

For example, I might “dog ear” the recent page, but then I have to thumb around to feel for the bend. The best method, I find, is to use a physical bookmark. Page load times for websites are similar.

Website load time refers to the total time it takes for a webpage to display all its contents after you type a URL into a browser or click a link.

But it’s not just about what’s shown to the naked eye. You only know the total website load time when all the webpage’s elements load completely. That includes paragraphs of text, images, and even scripts and stylesheets you don’t see on the frontend.

Like using a bookmark in a book, you too can improve the load time of your website with certain tactics. I’ll teach you all about website load times below.

Website Load Time Basics

We measure website load time in seconds. That timer starts the moment a browser sends a request, and it stops when the content appears fully on the screen. Website load times affect everything from the user experience to search engine rankings.

Why load time matters infographic

But what makes your website take longer to load? Sometimes it has to do with your server performance (hosting). Other times, load time involves the network speed or the file sizes produced by your website content, themes, and plugins.

Core Web Vitals

Google has a set of metrics for measuring user experience on the internet. These metrics, called Google’s Core Web Vitals, look at elements like interactivity, loading performance, and visual stability of a website.

More specifically, Google uses metrics like Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and First Input Delay for its analysis. And that analysis helps Google decide which websites deserve higher rankings.

Three key metrics related to load time include:

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric looks at the largest visible content elements and then measures how long it takes to load. It usually refers to a large image or block of text. I like it as a metric since it measures how quickly users see the most important content.
  • First Input Delay (FID): Google looks at this metric to see how long it takes for the webpage to respond to an interactive move by the user. For instance, it may measure how long your site takes to allow a user to click a button.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Once loaded, webpages may still try to load content or shift around the layout. It’s troubling, however, to see too many layout shifts. CLS measures the total sum of unexpected shifts while the page is visible.

Google factors in several other metrics in its equation, but these are the most important in my book. A low LCP puts the main content front and center quickly, while a respectable FID ensures the user can interact. Finally, a low CLS score indicates fewer distracting movements.

Why Website Load Time Is Important

When I open a webpage, I find it painful to wait for more than one or two seconds. Longer page load times make for a poor user experience. But that’s not all. Search engines discount websites with slow loading times, and many companies find that their conversion rates decrease.

User Experience (UX)

The user experience of a website involves many components, but it mainly refers to how a user feels about the interface.

Can I move around smoothly without distractions or popups? Are paragraphs and images viewable on my current device? Can I click through to buy or read something without too many steps?

A slow page load time affects all these questions. The longer it takes me to get to where I want to go, the more likely I am to leave the site.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Website page load time is crucial to finding your website higher in the search engine rankings. Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all penalize websites when they have noticeable page load issues.

That’s because it makes for a less user-friendly internet. After all, why would they recommend websites that frustrate users?

Conversion Rates

If you make money with your website or bring in other types of conversions, like email list subscribers, expect to see those conversion rates drop if you fail to address website loading issues.

Online stores require fast page load times to make sales, as do blogs, business websites, and booking websites with conversion elements.

No one likes to wait long to make a purchase or sign up for something, especially when there are so many competitors to choose from.

Factors Affecting Website Load Time

I’ve explored how page load times can hurt or help your website and business overall, but I’m sure you want to know the factors that affect website load time. This way, you know which areas of your website to improve, whether that’s the server, file size, or things like caching.

Server Response Time

The server response time refers to the amount of time it takes to respond to the browser’s request for a webpage. For our websites, we want the fastest server response times possible.

Impact:

  • Slow server response times from poor hosting
  • Slower speeds during traffic spikes
  • Inefficient backend code delaying load times

To solve issues with slow server response times, I like to turn directly to my web host. The best route is usually to find a faster hosting provider or at least a hosting plan from your current host that accommodates the size of your website.

Otherwise, I recommend optimizing your server configurations or employing load balancers — these spread incoming traffic loads across multiple servers.

File Size and Page Weight

The overall page weight of any webpage adds up the size of all images, videos, CSS, and scripts on that particular page. Combined together, file sizes and content sizes have a significant impact on how long it takes for your pages to load properly.

Impact:

  • Heavier pages take longer to load
  • Slower networks struggle with heavier pages
  • Your website loads fine but certain heavyweight items — like images or videos — may struggle to render

I have several solutions for large file sizes and heavy page weights: Start by compressing images with an automated integration. That shrinks what are commonly very heavy items without degrading quality.

It’s also wise to minify CSS and JavaScript, which makes those files smaller by removing redundancies and bulk. Again, some integrations do this for you. Another solution is to reduce unnecessary code and plugins.

Caching

Whether or not you have caching implemented on your website definitely affects website loading speeds. Caching, a handy process usually activated with a plugin or integration, stores scripts, images, and other parts of your website on a user’s browser so that it doesn’t have to load all of them every time. As a result, users see faster page load times.

Impact:

  • Without proper caching, a website has to load all elements from scratch every time
  • There is more load put on the server with improper caching
  • Your website uses more bandwidth (worse performance) without caching

I prefer to leverage caching tools on all my websites to improve server performance and speed up the delivery of content to users. You can often install a plugin to implement server-side caching and browser caching. Sometimes hosts offer these, too.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Whenever I run a website without a content delivery network (CDN), it blows me away how fast my website becomes once I actually add one. This is the heavy hitter for content delivery since it uses a network of distributed servers to deliver content from the nearest geographical server to the user.

This pulls so much weight off your server and allows for the rapid loading of heavy objects like images.

Impact:

  • CDNs reduce latency
  • They improve load time by delivering website assets (like images and scripts) from the closest location to the user
  • They reduce the usage of server resources, allowing for a higher-performance operation

This is an easy solution for any website. If you don’t have a CDN, get one — either from your host, if they offer it, or from a third-party integration. Notable CDN options include Cloudflare and Amazon Cloudfront.

Render-Blocking Resources

Imagine a projector at a movie theater. You can turn on the projector, but you must also load other resources for the movie to play. You either need to load a flash drive or a film reel. Whatever you load also needs to be optimized for that projector; you can’t use an enormous IMAX reel on a cheap project from Temu, after all.

Websites are similar, except they have “render-blocking resources,” which are certain CSS files or scripts that block the rendering of a webpage until they’re fully loaded.

Impact:

  • The entire page doesn’t display until the necessary files get loaded
  • Google metrics like Time To First Paint take longer
  • You may see higher bounce rates because your website might appear broken

To solve issues with render blocking resources, I like to turn to asynchronous loading for scripts. It’s also important to optimize CSS delivery and defer non-essential JavaScript. If these sound confusing, simply use a website optimization plugin to complete all those jobs for you.

Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization plays a large role in page load time for a few reasons. When I open a webpage on my phone, for instance, the server has to do some work to convert all its elements to a mobile environment. When not properly optimized for mobile devices, that means slower load times thanks to bulky content.

Impact:

  • Large file sizes struggle to load into a mobile interface
  • Poorly coded mobile versions take longer to load
  • Uncompressed images have issues loading on smaller devices

I can’t stress the importance of responsive design if you’d like to solve issues with mobile optimization. You should also focus on publishing mobile-friendly images — with the use of compression and smaller dimensions.

For a quick check, I run BrowserStack’s Responsive Checker Tool to see if my sites actually operate well on mobile devices.

Tools to Measure and Analyze Load Time

If I have a new website, I always analyze its load time. The same goes for older websites. At some point, you may realize that you have too many large images, or perhaps a new plugin conflicts with your server, causing slower page load speeds.

Regardless, it’s best to have some tools to help measure and analyze load times.

  1. Google PageSpeed Insights: My go-to analysis tool, Google PageSpeed Insights, takes your website and calculates its performance on both mobile and desktop devices. It gives me separate metrics for both interfaces, making it clear where the problems live. Some of my favorite features include diagnostics for optimizing images, suggestions for removing render-blocking resources, and insights into how the site stacks up with Google’s Core Web Vitals.
  2. Lighthouse (Built into Chrome DevTools): If you’d like to implement an automated tool for improving the performance and page load speeds on your website, I suggest looking into Lighthouse. It’s integrated directly into Chrome DevTools to optimize website resources instantly. It’s mainly for viewing performance insights. For instance, you get comprehensive audits of website performance, SEO, and accessibility.
  3. GTmetrix: GTmetrix is a website where you type in your own URL to receive detailed reports and performance metrics. It delivers an overall score alongside more specific numbers for things like Largest Contentful Paint. I particularly like how GTmetrix analyzes mobile and desktop interfaces with waterfall charts to show how your content loads in real time.
  4. WebPageTest: I consider WebPageTest one of the more accurate page load testing systems, since it allows you to test page load speeds from servers in specific locations. Therefore, I might run a performance test from a server in Europe and then see how it does in the United States. Some advanced features include testing on scripting and analysis of performance on real mobile devices.
  5. Pingdom Website Speed Test: For monitoring uptime and tracking performance trends, I turn to Pingdom Website Speed Test. On the surface, it’s similar to GTmetrix — with its page load scores and page size metrics — but it also provides wonderful tracking to see how your website performs over time and after you change its content.

While you may have to pay for some of these platforms, others (like Chrome DevTools) are completely free to use, so you can take advantage of speed optimization tools even if you don’t have a big budget.

How to Optimize Website Load Time

When I talk about caching images and minifying JavaScript, you may be looking for more actionable tips on how to complete those tasks. That’s especially true once you take advantage of tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix.

What happens after you know what to improve? Below, I’ll show you how to optimize website load times with a few of my favorite tactics.

1. Optimize Images

Large, uncompressed images have the potential to slow down load times drastically. Let’s say you know you need to optimize your images. How do you make that happen?

Solutions:

  • Use modern image formats (WebP)
  • Compress images without losing quality
  • Implement lazy loading

You can optimize images with Adobe Photoshop or another photo editing software. For a free, browser-based approach, go with options like TinyPNG or Squoosh. Platforms like WordPress have automated image optimization tools as well.

2. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

What’s an unminified file? It’s one that contains unnecessary spaces and characters. As a result, the file size ends up being larger than needed. Here’s your goal: minify all files to reduce page weight and speed up load times.

Solutions:

  • Minify CSS
  • Minify JavaScript
  • Minify HTML files

My personal favorite tool for JavaScript minification is UglifyJS. There’s also CSSNano for CSS files and HTMLMinifier for, you guessed it, HTML files. Options such as Minify handle multiple file types.

3. Enable Compression

Think of all the resources on your website: images, videos, text blocks, template files, and folders filled with code. You can compress them all. That compression reduces the size of resources, resulting in faster delivery to your end users.

Solutions:

  • Enable Gzip compression on your server
  • Turn on Brotli compression
  • Consider a CDN that also helps with compression

Sometimes web hosts include built-in compression software. Otherwise, I suggest a CDN like Cloudflare or a WordPress plugin if using that for your content management system.

4. Reduce HTTP Requests

Whenever you or I visit a webpage, every loaded element requires an HTTP request. Do you see an image? That’s one HTTP request. Stylesheets and scripts demand HTTP requests, too. As you may have guessed, having too many HTTP requests slows down load times.

Solutions:

  • Combine CSS and JavaScript files
  • Using CSS sprites
  • Simplify your page design

There are many WordPress optimization plugins to reduce HTTP requests. For CSS sprites specifically, I prefer SpriteMe. You can combine files with tools called bundlers, such as Parcel or Rollup.

5. Use Asynchronous Loading

There are two types of scripts that load whenever you bring up a website. Synchronous scripts, those that I see as forcing their way through before anything else can happen, hurt your page load speeds. Asynchronous loading, alternatively, allows for other assets to load at the same time.

Solutions:

  • Use asynchronous loading for non-essential JavaScript files
  • Consider lazy loading
  • Send difficult loads to tools called web workers

Ideally, your web host already has asynchronous loading tools configured into your hosting environment. If not, I recommend turning to lazy loading libraries that defer the loading of synchronous assets until absolutely necessary.

Other options include JavaScript libraries and tools to push dynamic script loading.

6. Leverage Browser Caching

As I mentioned earlier, caching stores your website resources in the user’s local browser. As a result, there’s no need for the browser to re-download unchanged content. It’s preloaded, so the server doesn’t need to spend any energy on it.

Solutions:

  • Set up browser caching rules to retain static resources for repeat visits
  • Use a CDN that implements caching
  • Configure caching on your server to control headers and other files

Websites like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix have their own recommendations for browser caching tools. Use those, or consider signing up for a CDN like Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront for the most straightforward browser caching experience.

There are many WordPress plugins for browser caching, too.

7. Optimize Web Hosting

If I use a budget hosting provider for a high-traffic eCommerce website, I’m bound to see poor page loading results. The same goes if I choose a shared hosting plan. In short, a slow hosting provider or plan increases server response times. That’s especially true during traffic spikes.

Solutions:

My advice is to look for a reputable, reliable host as soon as possible. This way, you never worry about surges in traffic or server issues slowing down page load speeds. Notable favorites of mine include DigitalOcean — especially for cloud and VPS hosting — along with SiteGround, HostGator, and A2 Hosting for VPS and dedicated hosting.

Common Mistakes That Slow Down Load Time

We all make mistakes. My goal, however, is to help you minimize as many of those mistakes by learning from my own in the past. Here are my most common mistakes to avoid that would otherwise slow down your site’s load times.

Large, Uncompressed Images

I cringe watching large images try to load on mobile devices. Even some desktop computers struggle to load bulky, high-resolution images. Unoptimized images slow down your site, and that’s particularly true on mobile devices.

To fix this, compress all the images on your site with automated tools. Don’t forget to use appropriate, browser-compatible image formats like JPEG 2000 and WebP.

Render-Blocking JavaScript and CSS

A massive mistake I see many new website owners make is forgetting to fix scripts and stylesheets that block website rendering. Neglecting that problem slows down your page loading.

The solution is to asynchronously load elements like inline critical CSS and JavaScript while also deferring non-critical resources.

Not Using a CDN

Think about your hosting server as a single computer sitting in a data center somewhere. It’s stuck in one location, no matter what. That stagnant location results in increased latency for users far away.

CDN definition and infographic

As you can see, geographical proximity to the server matters for loading times. The solution is to implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to send content to users over a network of servers, some of which end up closer to your users.

Too Many Redirects

Not only do I consider excessive redirects a sign that a website has major trouble, but those extra redirects also slow download speeds. That’s because every additional redirect requires more requests from the browser to the server.

To minimize redirects, I encourage you to fix all redirect chains, making everything a direct link.

Ignoring Mobile Optimization

Can you imagine a world where we still catered only to desktop computers? Even with how much of our browsing is done on phones, you’d be surprised how many website and template designers still focus on desktop design first.

It’s a travesty because consumer trends have shifted toward mobile browsing. And if you try to load desktop-optimized resources on a smartphone, I can assure you’ll do some waiting.

The fix to this issue is to put a focus on mobile optimization. If you choose a template for your website design, test it on all your mobile devices first. Implement a mobile-first strategy too, by compressing images and testing load times on mobile networks.

Monitoring and Maintaining Optimal Load Time

You’ve optimized your site for the fastest load time. Now the site is up and running. You can just sit back and relax now, right? I can’t say that’s the greatest idea. There’s maintenance involved. Here’s how to monitor and maintain the optimal load time in the most passive manner.

  • Regular Performance Audits: Make a regular schedule to run audits on your page load times. Use tools like Google Lighthouse or GTmetrix to run those audits and see what might be slowing down your site. I recommend running audits every month.
  • Continuous Optimization: The continuous optimization of a website means regularly updating your website code, plugins, and scripts. You don’t have to mess with the code yourself. That’s what the developers of these tools are for. They release the updates. All you have to do is click the Update button to remain optimized for performance.
  • Monitor Hosting Performance: It’s easy to forget about your hosting provider. They’re just sitting there, chugging away in the background. It’s your job to keep tabs on the host. I have a habit of tracking server uptime and performance regularly. And if page load times look off, I consider upgrading my hosting, especially as traffic grows.
  • Monitor User Behavior: Often the users on your website serve as the canaries in the coalmine. They’re the ones moving around your website, so of course, you want to see if they hit a friction point in the interface. Perhaps you discover that some user interactions take too long or that everyone sits and waits on your checkout page for an extended period. Luckily, Google Analytics has excellent features to monitor user behavior.
  • A/B Testing: Here’s a way to test the behavior of your users against multiple versions of your website. A/B testing works wonders for comparing load times and user interactions with different site versions. In the past, I’ve found that a simple button location or image size can slow down page load speeds significantly. And I could only figure that out with A/B testing.

If you follow my tips, your website load time will drop significantly.

Speed Means Everything Online

It affects your conversions. It can boost your search engine rankings. And it ensures your website visitors actually stick around. Website loading time, the speed at which your web pages load, can spell the difference between a successful website and one that flounders.

With my tips, however, you’re equipped to test, optimize, and maintain your load times for the speediest results possible.