Despite
Jeremy Clarkson’s insistence of “Power!”
those of us making websites can’t count on users having the latest and greatest
hardware. Mobile browsing is also up over data connections that don’t measure
up to the speeds of Google Fiber. So, we have to be the ones to check the speed
limit on our websites.
If we can’t
increase power, then we have to copy from The
Martian and shed weight. Images, videos, and other multimedia are popular
on websites, as are all manner of widgets that take up processing power,
meaning the webpage renders more slowly. But we have to have some flash and
style with our substance, so the trick then becomes knowing how much is too
much.
Enter
website speed tests. Many websites will gladly test the loading time of your site,
as well as give a breakdown as to what’s causing the slowdown. A quick search
turns up dozens, but make sure to go with a free one such as www.pingdom.com or www.uptrends.com.
Run the
test multiple times to get an average score. Most of the time you won’t be able
to do much about things such as leveraging browser cache or combining
javascript (we’re writers, not code monkeys [Okay, I’m a bit of a code monkey]).
However, you can reduce your image and multimedia use. Scale back on the
resolution of pictures on your site, and link them to full-size versions on a
free imaging site. Put in small embeds of videos, or just link to youtube and
skip the embedding. Change the number of posts displayed on your website at one
time. Make use of a jump link to keep images and other media off the main page.
Trim down the number of widgets or add-ons in the site.
The goal is
to keep the load time down. If it takes more than five seconds to load a page,
your readers may become impatient, particularly on a mobile device. Plus, you
don’t want to eat too much into their data plans.