Why site speed is important 

Good website speed is essential for our Google ranking, our supporter experience, and in turn, the success of our fundraising and campaigns.

• A one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. 
• Research by Google found that 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. 
  Across all markets around 67% percent of our website traffic is via mobile, this will continue to increase. 
• Website speed is a major factor in Google’s ranking for desktop and mobile searches. 

3 things you should do 

When building pages and preparing content, try to adhere to the following guidelines: 

1. Compress your images 
   Ensuring that your images are no larger than necessary can significantly improve page load time.  Before uploading images to Engaging Networks, you should always compress them, here is a free and simple jpg/png compression tool. Umbraco has inbuilt compression functionality so it's not required here.
   
   
2. Avoid using video on your pages, including the video panels provided for Engaging Networks templates. Videos have a significant impact on page speed.
   
   
3. Avoid embedding iframes - these are very slow to load, resulting in a poor user experience. They also come with a security risk.
4. Use optimal file formats for images
   Photographs - images on the website should be JPEGs, this is a smaller format than PNG. PNG is best used for detailed graphics.
   
   GIFs - Despite GIFs being very popular for animation, it is a very old file format that can lead to slow page load and therefore, poor user experience. GIFs should be used sparingly and should always be compressed when they are used - max size 200kb.
   
   Everybody who views the GIF has downloaded it from our website to their device. For every thousand people viewing a 1MB GIF at the same time. that means 1 GB of website bandwidth being consumed at that one point in time. This creates a huge spike for our website and that in turn can create unforeseen consequences for staff and users.
   
   

   On web pages, GIFs can’t be read out by screen-readers for the visually impaired or blind, and they similarly can’t be interpreted by Google/search engines which, combined with their impact on page load speed, will negatively affect our search engine ranking as well as user experience.

   
   
5. Reduce redirects  
   Having many redirects can mean slower page loading times. Avoid and simplify redirects when you can. Each redirect means the supporter is waiting for another HTTP request-response to complete. 
   
   
6. Do not add any custom styles to our webpages. Not only do inline styles impact page speed, our pages are designed inline with our brand guidelines and should not be customised.