Guest Post by WordCamp Albuquerque Speaker Ben Byrne
You could be losing visitors in the blink of an eye.
Data from major Internet providers like Google, Amazon and Akamai has shown that how fast a website loads significantly affects user behavior. People may visit a website less often if it is slower than a competitor by as little as 250 milliseconds — less time than it takes to blink. A one-second delay in page load time can reduce conversions by 7%. To pile on, because users don’t like slow sites, Google even uses load time as a factor in computing PageRank results. In short: It pays to be fast.
There are a lot of factors that can affect your site’s performance, such as the configuration and specifications of the web server your site lives on, using a content delivery network (CDN), and how much data your site eats up. But there are plenty of factors beyond the sheer number of bits and server/internet speed that affect your page load time, such as HTTP connections, DNS lookups, and asset load sequencing.
If you’re a front-end developer and you’re serious about building websites that load as fast as possible, come to my session to learn about techniques you can use in your markup and themes — whether on WordPress or some other system — to help things load as quickly as possible. We’ll also cover tools you can use to assess whether your site is doing all it can to load quickly, such as Y!Slow.
