No-one likes a slow website – Google included

Checking the load speed of dental websites with Pingdom Tools

Have you ever looked at a flashy website on your fast broadband connection and desk-top PC and, later, tried to load the same site on your mobile ‘phone over 3G or slower wi-fi connection? Quite often the experience you get on your desk-top is a long-way away from that on your mobile ‘phone – so often that same website with the huge background images and clunky coding under the bonnet, just doesn’t load.

Let’s take a closer look at the issues….

This is a classic case of form over function and one where the website designer neglected to take a holistic view of user experience. As someone who has grown up very close to web accessibility and user experience optimisation, I find this particularly irksome. I suspect that the website owners do too, just as soon as they realise what has been delivered by their designer.

A couple of recent cases in the dental marketing world prompted me to write this blog. The first concerned a well-known dental speaker who had his new website designed by a prominent design company. On the surface, the website looked very flashy but frankly was nearly unnavigable, didn’t work correctly on mobile devices and had a home page with a file size of over 3.5 mb – nearly three times the average. You can imagine how “well” it loaded.

The same design company also produced a couple of sites recently which incorporated large, glossy images that changed periodically. Both were designed to be responsive, i.e. “optimised” for mobile and tablet as well as desk-top PCs – however, the background images were so large (>5mb) that the sites were effectively unusable on mobile platforms.

Both companies approached us for a second opinion on the usability of their websites and to assess why they were performing worse than expected in Google. We advised on the underlying technical issues and recommended suitable fixes.

The above examples illustrate why you should ask your web designer several simple questions about your new site, starting with these basics:

• is my site optimised for mobile and tablet viewing; does it use a responsive design? (more on this here)
• what are the page file sizes? Anything much more that 1.25 mb and the user experience is at risk

Of course, you should also check how the site performs during the development phase, not just on your desk-top PC but also on mobile and preferably using a range of 3G and wi-fi speeds. Ask your designer to sign-off against these simple performance criteria.

Free tools for testing your website

Several free tools exist on the web for testing website load speed – our preferred system is called “Pingdom Tools”.

This tool allows you to enter a website address and then proceeds to analyse its load-speed. At the end of the test, the system shows load time for each component on the web page. This is ideal to show the items which are causing problems – typically large images, script calls to external services and unnecessary java-script. However, you don’t really need to understand all of the technicalities; simply look for the overall load-time and if it’s much above a couple of seconds or if the file size > 1.5mb, then maybe have a word with your designer.

Here are a couple of screen grabs from Pingdom Tools for one of the dental sites I mentioned earlier. The name of the site is obfuscated for obvious reasons.

Note the huge file size and load time. Below we can see why:

This section of the Pingdom analysis shows the main culprit – the designer has used three background images which, for web use, are huge. On a regular roaming connection, this site would be abandoned by most users.

Site load speed and the effect in Google

As well as user experience, there is another very good reason to make sure your site is optimised to load efficiently – Google. Recently Google has explicitly stated that load speed is now part of its ranking algorithm; slow websites will be penalised whereas fast ones can expect a boost in the search results.

Summary

Web page load speed has always been important but today, more-so than ever. With web users increasingly moving to mobile, it’s essential to provide a great user experience on all devices. Google too, has made it clear that there are advantages to be gained by webmasters who ensure that their sites load efficiently.

At Dental Media we check all of our web designs to ensure that they are cross-browser compliant, mobile and tablet friendly and fast loading. Please call us on 01332 672548 for a no-obligation health check on your website.