A slow website isn’t just costing schools in terms of time. It could cost them in terms of lost information for parents and in terms of lost business for prospective students. Search engines also use website loading times to determine whether a website should be shown at all. This article explores the main factors that affect a website’s speed and provides advice on how to deal with them.
The First Few Seconds Count
Within a few seconds of visiting a website users will decide whether or not the pages are working. If parents are checking for a late announcement, such as a school closure due to snow, they will want to find out straight away whether the school has announced any late updates. They won’t want to wait for what seems an age for the homepage of the website to load. They will close the website, ring the school office instead and could even miss the announcement.
Mobile Matters More Than Desktop
The majority of people viewing your school’s website will be doing so on the go – i.e. out and about on their phone while travelling to and from school, outside of the school gates, etc. It is well established that broadband speeds across the UK can vary greatly, and therefore a page which loads in a reasonable time on your school’s wifi connection may load very slowly on a parent’s mobile phone signal. Testing your school website on a mobile phone with the mobile data switched on, rather than just the wifi, will give you a more realistic idea of how your website is performing.
Google Rewards Fast Pages
Google uses measurements of website interaction called Core Web Vitals to assess how quickly a page loads, how soon a user is able to interact with it and how much it jumps around as it loads. These measurements will affect how your school website ranks in search results compared to other school websites, amongst other factors. You can check your Core Web Vitals for free and within a few minutes to see how your website is performing.
Photos Are Usually the Problem
Most slow school websites are caused by images. This includes event photos, school trip galleries and even sports day photos uploaded by parents at large file sizes. A single phone camera photo can be up to 5MB in size. In reality most web pages only need images of around 200-300KB per image. By resizing your images to the exact size of where they are going to be displayed on a web page and saving them as compressed JPEG or WebP files you can drastically reduce the load time of your image heavy pages. See also Websites for schools. There is published guidance on an example of an education-focused online resource that covers this in more detail.
Choose Hosting Built For Speed
Cheap shared hosting can be sub-standard in terms of performance. Even mid-range shared hosting can cause problems during school closing snow events or during the busy admissions period at the end of year. Schools need fast, reliable websites and this typically means spending a little more for a high-performance hosting solution with dedicated resources and a content delivery network (CDN). Many school website providers include fast hosting as part of their service in their standard packages, so it’s worth checking what’s included before opting for the cheapest option.
Cut Back on Heavy Add-Ons
There are also lots of add-ons that can greatly increase a page’s load time. These include social media feed widgets, embedded school calendars, large PDF newsletters that have been uploaded to a website as scanned documents, and more. Each of these embedded elements can in itself be slow to load and also often load lots of code from another website. Ideally, these would be replaced with simple links to relevant school content or even just a static link to the school’s social media profiles. The Department for Education provides a lot of guidance on what schools are required to publish on their website, which can provide a good starting point to work out what to include on a page and what can be a link to further information elsewhere on the school’s website.
Free Tools To Check Your Speed
No technical knowledge required! Simply go to Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool and enter in the URL of the school website page you have created. This will return a score and a number of simple explanations of what is causing any problems. GSMArena-style website testing tools, and GTmetrix style website speed testing tools also provide similar results and display a ‘waterfall’ graph of the loading of a website, showing what is loading and when.
Make Speed Checks A Habit
Keep your school website for a school up to date and run a speed test once every term, preferably after you have added a lot of new photos or other content to a page. A simple check up will help you track any problems before they become serious and take only about 10 minutes to complete.
A simple website that loads quickly and is easily accessible by parents on their mobiles is all that is needed to stop them ringing the school office to find out what is going on!
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