If you’ve managed a website or worked on SEO, you already know the importance of loading speed when it comes to ranking your site on search results.
But what are the steps that can be taken to improve a website’s page speed? For this, you first need to know the factors that affect a page’s speed. Then, you can start working on those factors to optimize your page.
In this article, we’ll go through what page speed is, and why it’s important. We’ll also look at some of the most common and efficient ways how you can improve a page’s speed yourself.
So, let’s get started!
What is Page Speed?
According to Uptrends, “Page speed is the amount of time it takes between the browser’s request for a page until the browser completes processing and rendering the content.”
Simply put, page speed refers to how quickly your page’s content loads when someone visits your page.
Page speed is an important part of the user experience. On average, your potential audience will not expect a loading time of more than 2 seconds. Any more than that might hinder their experience and increase your bounce rate.
Why is Your Page’s Loading Speed Important?
A Google study stated that an increase of 2 seconds in page loading time (from 1 to 3 seconds) increases the probability of bounce (visitors leaving the page) by 32%. If a page is loading 10 seconds slower then the bounce rates can be expected to increase by 123%.
These numbers show just how important it is to deliver your content in the fastest way possible. High load times also bring down engagement and conversions on your website.
Page Speed Insights is a tool offered by Google to test your page load speed on both desktops and mobile. This further strengthens the argument of how important page speed is for your rankings.
Furthermore, Google has announced that page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile search results.
The announcement states:
Users want to find answers to their questions quickly and data shows that people really care about how quickly their pages load. The Search team announced speed would be a ranking signal for desktop searches in 2010 and as of this month (July 2018), page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches too.
Tools to Measure Your Page Speed
Before starting with the optimization, you’ll need to gauge where you need to improve. There are several tools available on the internet for free that will help you measure your website speed.
Here is a list of the most commonly used tools:
Through these tools, you’ll get a performance report of your page load speed (both desktop and mobile), and where the page needs improvements. You can then evaluate and make the necessary improvements using the steps below.
Ways to Improve Page Loading Speed
1. Use a Performance-Optimized Host
We all want to save money wherever possible. But with lesser costs come more complications. That’s not to say that the priciest web hosting solution is always the best. You need to properly research the options in the market and choose the best alternative.
Cheap hosting solutions are often based on shared servers, which end up straining your website resources.
If your website has a lot of resources including pages, images, and animations it’s always better to go with the premium servers. These servers will ensure fast page load times regardless of the traffic.
2. Leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. It can help improve page loading speed.
How this works is that a CDN makes copies of your website which are stored at different data centres across countries. This decreases the load on a single server and ensures a faster and more reliable site.
3. Minify CSS, Javascript, & HTML
Minification is a process that strips out all unnecessary characters, comments, and spaces in the code. This process streamlines the code and thereby reduces the size of files.
Optimizing your code is really helpful in improving website performance and page load time.
If you’re not familiar with coding, there are several plugins available in the WordPress market to help you minify your HTML, Javascript, and CSS files.
4. Script Compression
It should not come as a surprise that reducing the size of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files can improve your page loading time.
For this, you can use a compression software like Gzip compression, a form of server-side data compression that’s helpful in reducing page loading time.
5. Reduce Redirects
A URL redirect is an instruction or method that automatically takes a user from one URL to another. URL redirects force your visitors to wait an additional amount of time each time it happens.
Therefore, having too many redirects on your site can really hurt its performance.
6. Enable Browser Caching
Browser or web caching is the process of storing information on the browser so that when a visitor comes back to a website, the browser doesn’t need to reload the entire page. The information stored can be in form of various assets such as images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files.
Since the page information is stored, it helps your page to load faster for the user.
There are several caching plugins available on WordPress such as WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache to optimize the caching settings for your site.
7. Remove unnecessary plugins
Most of the designers and developers on WordPress have a habit to bloat a website with all the available plugins under the sun. This affects the load on your server which in turn leads to slower site speed.
This is why a website is never a one-and-done thing. After it is published, you need to maintain the website, update the plugins regularly, and remove any unnecessary ones.
8. Optimize Images
Large images are one of the most common causes when it comes to slow websites. It’s also one of the most straightforward fixes to solve your loading problems.
While large images are gorgeous to look at, they’re not really worth the opportunity cost involved. Even a 1 MB file size is too much when it comes to website images.
There are numerous ways of compressing your images available in the market.
If your website is built on WordPress, you can use a plugin like WP Smush to directly reduce the size of all images in your media library.
If you’re not using WordPress as your CMS, you can use common tools like PhotoShop, Canva, and tinypng to optimize your images as per your needs.
9. Clean up your media library
Going through your website’s media library can be a surprisingly easy way to increase the average page load times.
This is the same as any other digital medium. The more space your assets are taking, the slower your device gets. Go through your media library and clean up any images, icons, or videos that are not being used on the website.
Conclusion
In conclusion, improving the page loading speed not only helps you with your SEO (ranking better on search engines) but also improves the user experience of your site. I hope this list can help you optimize your website and increase traffic.
Building a website can be a daunting task, add to it the work of maintaining it as well. If you need expert help in building and designing your website, you can check out our services here.
