![\"Super](\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/super_fast_internet_helps_businesses.jpg?resize=690%2C369&ssl=1\")
Even though our team members in our offices in London (UK) and Vilnius (Lithuania) enjoy some of the world\u2019s fastest internet speeds, we know\u00a0that a lot of our customers from around the world don\u2019t have the luxury of 300+ Mbps connections.<\/p>\n
Only after the website loading speed is acceptable and the page can load completely can the website visitor look further into your website, service or product, and only then do additional factors such as the design and user experience matter.<\/p>\n
After relaunching our website<\/a> and software earlier this year we mainly worked on a new design, browser compatibility<\/a>\u00a0and the content we show to our website visitors.<\/p>\n We completely overlooked the fact that the website should load as fast as possible in order to provide a decent<\/em> user experience.<\/p>\n Google and Bing take page speed into account<\/a> when ranking websites, too.<\/p>\n We’ve used three speed tools to help us optimise our website in a matter of a few hours:<\/p>\n When working on optimising a website it is common to look at four values of these kind of speed optimisation tools: performance grade, requests, load time, page size.<\/p>\n The performance grade<\/strong> is an internal value specific to the tool you are using as they decide how they calculate the final grade. However, it is still a fast and simple way to get a quick overview of the current state of your page speed. In general, the grade is based on the other three values and a variety of additional data the tool picks up from your website.<\/p>\n The amount of requests<\/strong> is the number of internal and external JavaScript, CSS, HTML and image files that\u00a0the website loads when you open it in your browser.<\/p>\n The load time<\/strong> is the time it takes to fully load the website measured in seconds.<\/p>\n The page size<\/strong> is the amount of data (think again about all the lovely HTML, CSS, JavaScript and image files) that’s\u00a0being loaded when you visit a website for the first time (no caching).<\/p>\n The aim is to get all numbers (except the performance grade<\/em>) as low as possible without compromising the user experience too much.<\/p>\n There are plenty of suggestions on how to achieve a faster loading website, but it often comes down to one crucial part: Images.<\/strong><\/p>\n We all know the idiom:<\/p>\n But what\u2019s the price we\u2019re paying?<\/p>\n Well, a website can easily reach > 1 MB in size by adding a couple of pictures or screenshots to it. And while I agree that these images might be a crucial part of the design and that they are necessary to attract attention and create value for the customer, they also decrease the page\u2019s loading speed.<\/p>\n By using a tool such as TinyPNG<\/a>,\u00a0you can decrease the size of an image tremendously without a high loss in picture quality. We ran a few tests before optimising our free invoice templates<\/a> page and got\u00a0the following results:<\/p>\n After simply implementing one change\u00a0<\/strong>we reached these results:<\/p>\n What did we change?\u00a0\u00a0We simply compressed our screenshots on that page with TinyPNG.<\/p>\n We gained close to 10 performance points by investing less than 5 minutes. That\u2019s a great return on investment in my opinion.<\/p>\n Other points to look into are:<\/p>\n Got any other\u00a0tips for improving the page speed of your business website? Let us know in the comments below!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Speed, speed, speed. While properties might be all about location, location, location, websites are all about the speed. It\u2019s needless to say that the design, functionality and user experience of a website is very important. However, none of these factors matter if the website visitor leaves the page because it loads too slowly (or not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3629,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[276,58,277,90],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/small_business_website_speed_ever_more_important.jpg?fit=1280%2C853&ssl=1","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5m6q6-Ww","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3628"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3628"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18833,"href":"https:\/\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3628\/revisions\/18833"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Google](\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/google_takes_a_thorough_look_at_your_page_speed.png?resize=690%2C409&ssl=1\")
\n
\n
A picture is worth a thousand words<\/h1>\n<\/blockquote>\n
![\"TinyPNG](\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/optimise_image_files_tiny_png.png?resize=690%2C172&ssl=1\")
![\"InvoiceBerry's](\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/invoiceberry_gtmetrix_speedtest_before_optimisation.png?resize=690%2C283&ssl=1\")
![\"InvoiceBerry's](\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/invoiceberry_pingdom_speedtest_before_changes.png?resize=690%2C184&ssl=1\")
![\"InvoiceBerry's](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/invoiceberry_gtmetrix_after_page_optimisation.png?resize=690%2C293&ssl=1\")
![\"InvoiceBerry's](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.invoiceberry.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/invoiceberry_pingdom_speedtest_after_adjustments.png?resize=690%2C212&ssl=1\")
\n