Ultimate Guide to Page Speed: What Impacts Page Speed?

Chapter 1: A Guide To This Guide
Chapter 2: Why Page Speed Matters To Digital Marketing
Chapter 3: What Impacts Page Speed? ← You are here
Chapter 4: Novice – Image Compression And Such
Chapter 5: Intermediate – Server Compression And Geekery
Chapter 6: Advanced – Varnish, Apache and nginx

In this post: What to look for. Why it matters. It’s a pipe, not a series of tubes. We realize the list is too long, and give up. And again, if you’re already an an experienced web pro, you can probably skip this section.

Web performance has three bottlenecks.

The client

The client, usually the web browser, asks the server for stuff. When the server delivers its response, the browser has to ‘draw’ it all. If a web page is poorly coded or structured, the browser has a hard time doing that rendering and slows down.

The server

The server gets the request from the client (web browser) and delivers a reply. It has to build all of the pages you see, process forms, sell products and services, manage leads and do all the other dirty work. If the server’s slow, everything’s slow. Speed it up and everything runs faster. But tweaking server performance requires expertise, so these tips are among the most advanced.

The pipe

The pipe (aka ‘bandwidth’) delivers the stuff the server creates. Once the web server replies to a browser request, the response sloshes its way through the pipe. The more you stuff into the pipe, the slower it goes.

Simple things like image compression can have a huge impact on site performance because they clog the pipe, eating up bandwidth so that the server can’t upload and the client can’t download quickly enough. These are among the easiest changes to make and can offer the biggest bang for the buck.