Imagine trying to load a website, and it takes an age. You’re tapping your foot, watching that loading bar crawl along, and you’re about ready to give up. That’s a surefire way to lose visitors, isn’t it? And Google doesn’t like it either. They penalise slow websites and favour the speed demons. So, when I was tasked with optimising the ICS Learn website, I knew it was a proper challenge. We needed to turn that snail’s pace into lightning speed.
Situation – The Slow-Loading Nightmare
The ICS Learn website was, shall we say, a bit sluggish. Some pages were taking an eternity to load, dragging down almost 10 to 20MB of files. That’s a lot of data for a website, and it was causing a real headache for users. We needed to find out what was causing the slowdown and come up with a plan to fix it. It was a bit like diagnosing a sick patient, trying to pinpoint the root cause of the problem.
Task – The Website Speed Mission
My task was to dive deep into the website’s performance, identify the bottlenecks, and create a plan to speed things up. We needed to understand what files were being downloaded, how big they were, and how we could optimise them. It was a proper detective job, piecing together the clues to solve the mystery of the slow-loading website.
Action – The Digital Speed Blitz
I started by using a range of tools to analyse the website’s performance: Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom. Each tool gave us slightly different insights, allowing us to get a comprehensive view of the problem. It was a bit like getting a second opinion from multiple doctors, ensuring we had all the information we needed.
The data revealed a major culprit: uncompressed images. Some images were a whopping 5MB each! That’s huge for a website. They were also being served at resolutions of 5000×3000 pixels, which is overkill for a website that typically displays images at around 1920×1080 pixels.
We had to go through the website and resize and compress all the images. I created a guide for the team on how to optimise images for the web, highlighting the benefits of using modern formats like WebP. We also implemented lazy loading, ensuring images below the fold were loaded later, speeding up the initial page load.
And it wasn’t just images. We also looked at optimising our CSS and JavaScript files, combining and minifying them to reduce their size and the number of requests.
Result – The Speed Boost Triumph
The result was a much faster and more efficient website. Download speeds improved dramatically, especially on mobile devices. It was a proper speed boost, a real win for both us and our users.
Pingdom performance results
Google page speed results
There will always be work that we can do to improve the overall speed of the website. In the future browsers will adopt new image types that will allow for even better image compression for example.
Ready to take your website to the next level? Get in touch with us today for a free website performance audit! We’ll analyse your website, identify areas for improvement, and develop a customised optimisation strategy to help you achieve your business goals.